Ανοιχτά χαρτιά Quotes

“Willing or not, we are all hostages of the joy of which we deprive ourselves. Here springs love’s pre-eternal sadness.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“Coincidence, when raised to a symbol, occurs with mathematical precision at the most crucial moment, even for the squarest of minds. A moment the rest of us call higher will, Fate’s gesture, something like that.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“Poetry should express the apex, should constitute a kind of pioneering outpost in the unexplored area of life, should precede other arts in the depiction of sensitivity. It should be the word and sword intervening in the spirit, so that matter, docile, can follow. Creation, especially poetic, is above all a result.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“I like to begin where winds shake the first branch.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“This is why I write. Because poetry begins where death is robbed of the last word.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“The splendor of youth is, to a point, the splendor of error. Jealous the old, who have everything previewed! The nightingale will never come sing over your wisdom. It won’t, darlin’, it won’t.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“And yet from what is to what could be you cross a bridge that takes you, no more, no less, from Hell to Paradise. And more bizarre: a Paradise composed of the exact same material as Hell. The only difference is our perception of the material’s arrangement – more easily understood by imagining it applied to ethical and emotional architectures – yet it’s enough to pinpoint the immeasurable difference. If the reality created by people whose half-mast emotions and sensations disallow, now and perhaps forever, the other architecture or, in other words, the revolutionary re-synthesis, then, to my thinking, only the spirit is free and able to take it on.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet’s authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That’s progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays

“…justice is a precise moment, nothing more.”
― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers - Selected Essays