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40 Quotes from “Zorba the Greek” Just Bursting with the Love of Life That Will Elevate Your Existence
“Great visionaries and poets see everything in the same way — for the first time. They see a new world before them each morning. No, they do not see this new world; they create it.”
-Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Anthony Quinn, the actor who played Zorba in the 1964 movie adaptation of this wonderfully life-affirming book, once had a knife pulled on him in New York City’s Central Park.
The attacker had come up to Quinn from behind and, with the knife pointed against his back, ordered him to turn around.
Quinn had just been nominated for an Oscar for portraying Kazantzakis’s ecstatic, life-loving creation who laughed at death, and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers with his philosophy of “living immediately and intensely.”
But in the dark of night, the knife-wielding attacker couldn’t possibly have known who he was about to stab.
What happened — and this is true! — is that when he turned around, the moon lit up Quinn’s face, and there was a flash — not of steel, but of recognition. That’s…that’s the guy from the movie! That’s Zorba the Greek — the Yea-sayer, the Life-affirmer, the Death-renouncing Zorba the Greek!
