The timing, manner and mood of a private assault on a new town are a serious matter.

The timing, manner and mood of a private assault on a new town are a serious matter. If the town should be one of the world's wonders, it is crucial. To arrive at Constantinople by air, for instance, and reach the city by the airport bus is to be swallowed b the saddest and most squalid of Balkan slums. It must be attacked from the sea and the haggish but indestructible splendour, crckling with all the atmospherics of its long history, allowed to loo slowly across the shining Propontis.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 301

The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical Greek culture

The evolution of Christianity into a logical system which could weather the shocks of millennia, was a Greek thing. The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical Greek culture. 

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 214

Why, Kyriakos Mavromichalis of course, his brother. Who else?

 The conversation drifted inevitably to politics. Like most of the Maniots, he was a firm royalist. I pointed to the poster of M. Petro Mavromichalis and asked if he had voted for him.

'Yes,' he said, 'but I think we should change our deputy....'

...

I asked him who he would prefer to represent the constituency: it was sad to contemplate this uprooting of traditional allegiances. He looked surprised. 'Who? Why, Kyriakos Mavromichalis of course, his brother. Who else?'

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 161

A Vlach is a plain-dweller

A Vlach is a plain-dweller, a descendant of of rayahs, a vile bourgeois, and Maniots who leave the peninsula to live like them are said, with accents of scorn, to have 'gone Vlach'.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 70

Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as The Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere and attuned to the One God, whether that of Justinian or of Mehmet the Conqueror. 'Gong-tormented' and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 196

But my dear, nothing beats Vatican gossip

... Steven Runciman, whom Paddy had met in Sofia in 1934 and who was now the British Council's Representative. Tall , fastidious and a brilliant linguist, Runciman was then working on the History of the Crusades that made his name; but his chief recreation was collecting scandals and stories. 'Royal gossip is very good,' he once said, 'and political gossip is even better; but my dear, nothing beats Vatican gossip.'

A. Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: an adventure (2013), 206

Never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight

The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization - the Coca-Cola age, yoke-fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.

P. Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree (1950), 48-49

One can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade

Though one may bitterly deplore, as I do most fervently, that the Turks ever set foot in Europe, it would be absurd to blame them for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for damage by flood. But one can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade for making that destruction inevitable and bringing about the wreck of eastern Europe for centuries

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 295

Nobody listens, but it is never turned off

The instrument [the radio] is nearly always faulty, all these sounds, turned on full blast, are strung in the connecting thread of an unbroken, ear-drum-puncturing and bat-like scream. Nobody listens, but it is never turned off. Towns are pandemonium. Every shop and cafe sends out a masterless, hydrophobic roar. These rabid wirelesses should be hunted out and muzzled or shot down like mad dogs. In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set. ... But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 144

Each village was a long solid sheaf of towers

Each village was a long solid sheaf of towers. There were scores of them climbing into the sky in a rustic metropolis, each tower seeming to vie with the others in attaining  more preposterous height: a vision as bewildering as the distant skyline of Manhattan or that first apparition of gaunt medieval skyscrapers that meets the eyes of the traveller approaching San Giminiano aross the Tuscan plain. But there were no bridges or ships here, no bastioned town wall or procession of cypresses to detract from the bare upward thrust of all these perpendiculars of sun-refracting facet and dark shadow. The tops were sawn off flat, the gun slits invisible. These two mad villages of Kitta and Nomia shot straight out of the rock in a grove of rectangular pipes the sides facing in every direction so that some of the towers were flanked with a stripe of shade, some turned bare and two-dimensional towards the sun, others twisted in their sockets and seems to present two visible and equal sides, one in light and one in shade, of symmetrical prisms. Nothing moved and in the trembling and fiery light they had the hallucinating improbability of a mirage.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 82