Adam Nicolson > Quotes

“A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.”
― Adam Nicolson

“Look at them on days like that, when the wind is blowing through the boundaries of fresh and stiff, and you will see them for what they are: wind-runners, wind-dancers, the wind-spirits, alive with an evolved ability to live with the wind, in it and on it, drawing out its energy to make their own feathered, mobile, ocean-ranging magnificence.”
― Adam Nicolson, The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers

“t's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“Look at a wild creature- even hold it in your hand- and it is obvious that you don't 'have' it. You hold it but everything it is stretches far beyond your enclosing fingers, in time and space and through its own interior existence. You may posess it, even for a moment, but it is not yours... Whatever it is to be known remains outside the grip of our knowing it.”
― Adam Nicolson, Life Between the Tides

“Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation’s lifeblood had been inclusiveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanctioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles,”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“the first objects to be designed with the sole purpose of killing another person.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, “Why has no one told me about this before?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Ignorance is not bliss; it's a missed opportunity”
― Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

“Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The purity of death holds no attraction for the Homeric Greeks. Their world is one in which the felt, sensed and shared reality, the reality of the human heart, is the only one worth having.”
― Adam Nicolson, The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

“The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence,”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the Iliad.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The Enquiry in England,’ Blake said, ‘is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen’s opinions in arts and science.”
― Adam Nicolson, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

“Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Iliad’s subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“One of the King James Bible’s most consistent driving forces is the idea of majesty. Its method and its voice are far more regal than demotic. Its archaic formulations, its consistent attention to a grand and heavily musical rhythm are the vehicles by which that majesty is infused into the body of the text. Its qualities are those of grace, stateliness, scale, power. There is no desire to please here; only a belief in the enormous and overwhelming divine authority, of which royal authority, ‘the powers that be’ as they translated the words of St Paul, was an adjunct and extension”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means “popular with the people”—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: “The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter.” The song, this poem, this story, is the divine”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“That shifting, layered sensibility is also, in part, the world into which the King James Bible was born. The king’s instructions were perfectly explicit: they were to use ‘circumlocution’, in other words language in which meaning was to be ‘sett forth gorgeously’. There was no terror of richness in this. Richness, as King David had known when he decorated the temple for God, was one of the attributes of God. Majesty, honour and power were gorgeous in themselves and the Jacobean sense of the beautiful loved both pearls and diamonds, both openness and ceremony. Miles Smith referred in his Preface to ‘the Sun of righteousness, the Son of God’, and it was the beams of that sun which the King James Translators would bring to the people. But the sense of clarity and directness was sewn and fused to those other Jacobean virtues: a pattern of order and authority; the majestic substance, the ‘meat’ of the word of God; the great ceremonial atmosphere of its long, carefully organised, musical rhythms, a ceremony of the word; an atmosphere both godly and kingly; both rich and pure, both multiplicitous and plain. This Bible, in other words, would absorb the full aesthetics of the age. You only have to read the Translators at full flood, feeling behind them the sense of unstoppable divine authority, to hear the immense, gilded majesty of the translation. In describing God’s assembling of the armies of a vengeful justice, they reached their apogee:”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar.”
― Adam Nicolson, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar

“The modern world had lost the thing which informs every act and gesture of Hatfield, of the King James Bible, and of that incomparable age: a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural, from theology to cushions, from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it. This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammar. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority. The language of the King James Bible is the language of Hatfield, of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible