Amsterdam Quotes

I took a voyage once
it is many years ago, now
to Amsterdam, and the owner, not my good cousin here, but another, took a fancy to go with me; and his wife must needs accompany him, and verily, before that voyage was over, I wished I was dead. I was no longer captain of the ship. My owner was my captain, and his wife was his. We were forever putting into port for fresh bread and meat, milk and eggs, for she could eat none other. If the wind got up but ever so little, we had to run into shelter and anchor until the sea was smooth. The manners of the sailors shocked her. She would scream at night when a rat ran across her, and would lose her appetite if a living creature, of which, as usual, the ship was full, fell from a beam onto her platter. I was tempted, more than once, to run the ship on to a rock and make an end of us all. ~ G.A. Henty

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin. ~ John Green

I'm just a girl from Amsterdam. It's a small city. Everybody knows Amsterdam, but it's still a small city. To come from there, to work with Will. i. am ... it's like, 'What happened?! What did I do right?' ~ Eva Simons

The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock. ~ Oscar Straus

The turnip cannot thrive in the tulips patch of soil. ~ Jessie Burton

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like. ~ Steven Amsterdam

Yet the need for justifying the wealth and power of great corporations in the eyes of the people has never been greater. Why not hark back to Florence, Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam? The great corporations could devote wealth and energies to cleaning up, improving and adorning our cities. Each large corporation might adopt a city and vie with other corporations to see whose city shines brightest. In the center of each financial district there should be a large plaza in which periodically poets, singers, storytellers and artists of every sort would compete for rich prizes. The corporations should see it as their duty to spot and encourage talent, and celebrate greatness. There should be social intimacy between the powerful and the creative. ~ Eric Hoffer

Love your children, for they are the seeds that will make this city bloom. ~ Jessie Burton

...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated. ~ Russell Shorto

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

Even the police have an unlisted number. ~ Morey Amsterdam

After he saw God [Tony Amsterdam] felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping."

"Like the rest of us." It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty.

Donna said, "That's what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn't freak the rest of us. And he said, 'You don't know what I saw. You don't know.' ~ Philip K. Dick

I've had the good fortune of studying the 17th-century art of Amsterdam in preparation for a film. ~ Jack O'Connell

He'd worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He'd worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them.
What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? . . . The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them - more than enough.
And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn't make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn't do this because of that and couldn't possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid. ~ Nescio

There are horizons through the brickwork, you wait and see. ~ Jessie Burton

Neighbours watching neighbours, twisting ropes to bind us all. ~ Jessie Burton

If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long. ~ Donna Tartt

And call me a pig, but isn't it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they're still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they're hanging the Closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam. ~ Julie Burchill

Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist. ~ Julie Burchill

After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I'm gonna tell her it's too hot for it, knowing she'll say it's for the plane and ask what if the room gets cold? ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars. ~ John Green

I used to do jacket design, and I'm very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would. ~ Steven Amsterdam

What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to
paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was the
stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies
in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew
to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been
worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if
he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in
Amsterdam. (Mendes Da Costa ~ Irving Stone

The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there's probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland. ~ Anne Frank

​While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. ~ Donna Tartt

Wouldn't you rather see the real Amsterdam?' No, Cat, dammit, no! I had no desire to see the real Amsterdam. We had reality back in Berkshire, that's not why we were here; we had no interest in the way things really were. A perfectly co-ordinated schedule of sightseeing was unravelling before my eyes. 'If we don't go to the Anne Frank House today, the whole plan falls apart.' I felt myself getting shrill. ~ Anonymous

I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there. ~ Steven Amsterdam

What was once, is no longer. ~ Jessie Burton

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From ~ Geert Mak

Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye. ~ Miroslav Penkov

You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still. ~ Jessie Burton

Location: Amsterdam, Where Fire Is Called Vlam ~ Kristin Cashore

They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, because they'd rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you're too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you've got a house and a lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you'll get a second's more existence because the bomb won't be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you're not anybody's main target, you've removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor's son will break in and steal a ~ Michael Cunningham

I feel younger than eighteen but burdened as a eighty-year-old. ~ Jessie Burton

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center. ~ John Green

It was clear just how much Tommy loved the city. New York City. The CKY Grocery on Amsterdam had giant, bright red Spartan apples every day of the year, even if it wasn't the right season. He loved that grocery, and the old, shaky Persian man who owned it. Tommy emphatically, yet erroneously believed that the CKY Grocery was the genuine heart of the great city. All five boroughs embodied distinct feelings for him, but there was only one that he'd ever truly romanticized. To him, Manhattan was the entire world.

He loved everything between the East River and the Hudson; from the Financial District up to Harlem; from Avenue A to Zabar's. He loved the four
seasons, although autumn was easily the most anticipated. To Tommy, Central Park's bright, almost copper hues in the fall were the epitome of orange. He loved the unique perfume of deli meats and subway steam. He loved the rain with such verve that every time it so much as drizzled, he would turn to the sky so he could feel the drops sprinkle onto his teeth. Because every raindrop that hit him had already experienced that much envied journey from the tips of the skyscrapers all the way down to the cracked and foot-stamped sidewalks. He believed every inch of the city had its own predetermined genre of music that suited it to a tee. The modal jazz of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter was absolutely meant for the Upper East Side, north of 61st Street. Precisely between Gershwin and gospel. He loved the view from his a ~ Ryan Tim Morris

I think Amsterdam is to Holland what New York is to America in a sense. It's a metropolis, so it's representative of Holland, but only a part of it - you know, it's more extreme, there's more happening, it's more liberal and more daring than the countryside in Holland is. ~ Anton Corbijn

It was in December. I stood in the back of the tram, all the way in the back. It drove through the country and stopped and started again, it took hours, the countryside was endless. And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields, most of them covered with straw, had it nice and warm, and the dunes sat bareheaded in the sun. And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn't bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamp flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too.
But I got colder and colder. And the tram ran as long as the sun shone. It's a long ride from Hillegom to Leiden and the days are short in December. By the end, a block of ice was standing there on the tram staring into the big stupid cold sun that was flaming red as though the revolution was finally starting, as though offices were being blown up all over Amsterdam, but still it couldn't bring a spark of life back to my cold feet and stiff legs. And it kept getting bigger and colder, the sun, and I got colder and stayed the same size, and the blue sky looked down very disapprovingly: What are you doing on that tram? ~ Nescio

My neighbor has two dogs. One of them says to the other, "Woof!" The other replies, "Moo!" The dog is perplexed. "Moo? Why did you say 'Moo'?" The other dog says, "I'm trying to learn a foreign language." ~ Morey Amsterdam

Look, it is snowing! Oh, I must
go out! Amsterdam asleep in the white night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges, the empty streets, my muted steps
there will be
purity, even if fleeting, before tomorrows mud.See the huge flakes drifting against the windowpanes. It must be the doves, surely. They finally make up
their minds to come down, the little dears; they are covering the waters and the roofs with a thick layer of feathers; they are fluttering at every window.
What an invasion! Lets hope they are bringing good news. ~ Albert Camus

I was in George Martin's studio in Amsterdam and he was telling me, 'They come in here and it takes them three days to do a bass line.' Well I'm not from that era. ~ Ringo Starr

In Amsterdam there lives a maid (Mark well what I do say) In Amsterdam there lives a maid. And she is the mistress of her trade: I'll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid! A-roving, a-roving, since roving's been my ru-eye-in, I'll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid! British seaman's songearly seventeenth centuryMost seamen's songs and chanties, from the sixteenthcentury on, were highly "permissive" when read aright.They were much bowdlerised in the nineteenth century,and many lost their original honesty and delight. Thisone, innocent except to the seamen's ears, survived.("Torove," is the sailor's term for the weft in canvas. It means"to insert" - "to pass through." "Trade," in English, hasalways had a sexual connotation.) ~ Tristan Jones

Most visitors to Amsterdam will wander into the red-light district out of sheer curiosity. The narrow streets are mostly safe day and night - just don't try to take pictures of the women working in the windows. ~ David Hewson

A Cannibal is a person who walks into a restaurant and orders a waiter. ~ Morey Amsterdam

I'm really big on family. I'll love catching up with my cousins. Everyone's in their twenties, so they're all on their grind at the moment, but when we get the time, I'll fly everybody to Amsterdam or Ibiza, and we can just hang for a week, chill, do nothing. ~ Tinie Tempah

I know that I am very popular in Holland, in fact I have visited Amsterdam several times to publicize my books. I have a great publisher in Holland and they have published all of my books in Dutch. ~ Jackie Collins

It is so. It cannot be otherwise. ~ Inscription On The Ruins Of A 15th Century Cathedral In Amsterdam

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world. ~ Alice Morse Earle

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane. ~ Abraham Pais

The night darkens, the stars unfriendly, the cold a knife upon her neck - but Nella waits, until she can no longer difference between Johannes and the darkness that carries him away. ~ Jessie Burton

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break? ~ Steven Amsterdam

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.

Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely. ~ Rebecca Solnit

We're going on a, um, windmill tour later this week."
If I'd wanted to shut them all up, I'd definitely succeeded. They all looked stunned.
Adrian spoke first. "I'm going to assume that means he's flying you to Amsterdam on his private jet. If so, I'd like to come along. But not for the windmills. ~ Richelle Mead

Prostitution is not exactly a reputable business over there either, even though the girls actually have to pay taxes on their earnings, and submit to regular health check ups. Even the prostitutes have universal healthcare over there. The benefit of legal prostitution is obvious: tax income for the city, healthier girls, and safety. In Amsterdam, each girl has an alarm button next to her bed that she can press if one of her "customers" tries to rape or hurt her. The police will arrive within minutes and protect the girl from harm. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married. ~ Jessie Burton

I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea."
He was quiet for a second. "God," he said. "I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam."
"But then I would've had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane," I said.
"Well, yeah," he said. "But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid."
I laughed pretty hard, hard enought that I felt where the chest tube had been.
"You laugh because it's true," he said.
I laughed again.
"It's true, isn't it!"
"Probably not," I said, and then after a moment added, "although you never know. ~ John Green

Why do you have to fly to Amsterdam?" he asked. "Is someone in your family ill?" I shook my head.
"So what it is, a girl?"
I nodded. "But it's not about her," I said. "It's just that I can't be here anymore." The pilot was silent for a moment, then asked, "Have you ever flown in a jump seat?" I managed to control my tears enough to say no. ~ Etgar Keret

Take care, take care. This city thrives! It's money gives you wings to soar. But it is a yoke on your shoulders and you would do well to take note of the bruise around your neck. ~ Jessie Burton

Then came the second Amsterdam discovery, although the principle was known elsewhere. Bank deposits ... did not need to be left idly in the bank. They could be lent. The bank then got interest. The borrower then had a deposit that he could spend. But the original deposit still stood to the credit of the original depositor. That too could be spent. Money, spendable money, had been created. Let no one rub his or her eyes. It's still being done-every day. The creation of money by a bank is as simple as this, so simple, I've often said, that the mind is slightly repelled. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

You walk into someone's house and they're dying, or they've got a family member who is dying. Your needs are minor; you're there to serve and to advise and to educate. You're not there to provide yourself. ~ Steven Amsterdam

Although I miss my family and friends when I'm away from Amsterdam, I've never had that feeling of missing a city like I have with New Orleans. Especially for the music. ~ Michiel Huisman

In 1996, the players at the VSB tournament in Amsterdam sent me a card for my wedding with this dedication, 'Anand congrats on your wedding. You were a great player, now be ready to lose 50 points'. ~ Viswanathan Anand

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand. ~ Steven Amsterdam

When the Internet arrived in Ireland ... it was like having Amsterdam's Red Light District in your own living room. ~ Tom Dunne

It was Begbie who ensured he could never return. He had done what he wanted to do. He could now never go back to Leith, to Edinburgh, even to Scotland, ever again. There, he could not be anything other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be. He'd stand or fall alone. This thought both terrified and excited him as he contemplated life in Amsterdam. ~ Irvine Welsh

I am a village boy, and Amsterdam for me was always the big town. ~ Anton Corbijn

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things. ~ Billy Gibbons

And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things too. Don't run out ahead of Him. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

In Amsterdam, the river and canals have been central to city life for the last four centuries. ~ Janet Echelman

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France. ~ Max Boot

The approach to that movie wasn't, 'Lets make this movie about Amsterdam and maple syrup.' The concept was, 'Lets go to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is fun.' So we flew to Amsterdam with our cameras and we saw what happened and then we got back and we sat down and we said, 'What's the movie here.' That's when we realized that the movie was 'The Maple Syrup Saga'. ~ Casey Neistat

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it. ~ Daniel Quinn

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies. ~ Geoffrey Blainey

Amsterdam: Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder. ~ Jessie Burton

A story is built on characters and reasons. ~ Steven Amsterdam

Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Rubella, Talipes, Amsterdam dwarfism, Austism, Asthma, Eczema, Epilepsy - the Sacred Disease. Moth madness, Papa calls it. Said Daniel. The Epilepsy, Papa used to say I was his little papillon de nuit - because of how I fluttered and got the shakes. Butterfly of the night. It suited him. ~ Emma Henderson

These little contradictions are in all of us. They're in me at least. And so I forgot that I had been awake for 30 hours and kept walking, grateful to be a little boat full of water, still floating. ~ John Green

The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, 'You're flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent. ~ Tucker Elliot

I get inspired in certain places. You have to write in places like Amsterdam or Paris or New Zealand, when you're standing on a yacht, looking out at the middle of the ocean. ~ Action Bronson

School and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish. "I got it in exchange for the leg," he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. "Now, I'm not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it wouldn't make sense to meet him without the girl who introduced me to his book." "It definitely wouldn't," I said. "So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said Amsterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed ~ John Green

Most people are flying to Heathrow because it's a hub, so they can fly on to other places, often long-distance flights. If they can't go on those long-distance flights from Heathrow, they will go to Paris, they will go to Amsterdam, they will go to Frankfurt, because those are viable alternatives. ~ Geoff Hoon

I just got back from Switzerland, which I've never been to. I went to Switzerland and Amsterdam. ~ Linda Cardellini

Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I've no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them - first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of course, simply walking among the poppies is enough to have an effect, as it was for Dorothy in Oz.) ~ Michael Pollan

Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone and eating breakfast. ~ David Nicholls

Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing. ~ Mary Lee Settle

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy. ~ Morey Amsterdam

It was funny - I'd sort of expected this place to be all dark and furtive, full of blokes darting nervous glances over their shoulders in case anyone they knew wandered in by mistake and saw them. Instead, it was all bright, gleaming white, the merchandise proudly displayed like a prozzie in an Amsterdam window. Only a lot less likely to give you the clap. ~ J.L. Merrow

the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety. ~ John Green

Father sat down on the edge of the narrow bed. "Corrie," he began gently, "when you and I go to Amsterdam-when do I give you your ticket?"
I sniffed a few times, considering this.
"Why, just before we get on the train."
"Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need-just in time. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

We're nothing more than prisoners to your desire. ~ Jessie Burton

I was discovered in Paris when I was there on a school trip at the age of 13. After that, my mom came in contact with Elite Amsterdam; then I started modeling. ~ Maud Welzen

I'm here because of a letter.
Not the kind with hearts and lipstick marks, but the kind that takes your breath away. I wanted it to have that effect on him, and so it was the story of how we fell in love told through our kisses. Both kisses we'd had and kisses I wanted to have, and places I wanted to kiss. Places like Paris and Amsterdam, along the river or by the canal, or Kauai under waterfalls.
It was an epic love letter, and it was all I'd ever wanted in my life-to feel that kind of epic love. ~ Lauren Blakely

A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else. First it's Jews, already abandoning France. Then it's homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, 'the most tolerant city in Europe'. Then it's uncovered women, targetted for rape in Oslo. And if you don't any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan. More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end for you. ~ Mark Steyn

That may be. But to decide that I was never going to live as a proper woman was not your choice to make.' 'What do you mean a proper woman?' 'A proper woman marries - she has children -' 'Then what does that make me? Am I not a proper woman? Last time I looked I certainly was. ~ Jessie Burton

Curator Shantrelle P. Lewis left for Amsterdam an Andy Warhol fellow, and came back with a film in her pocket. Please support this confrontation of the Netherlands' violently passive aggressive racist traditions, by an American Southern, aggressive aggressive. She's a top notch thinker and lover of questions ... ~ Dream Hampton

All we can do if we're lucky is stich up the mistakes other people make. ~ Jessie Burton

I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living! ~ Max Beckmann

If you're crossing an ocean for NSConference, there's a good chance you're stopping in Amsterdam. Come a week early and check out Mdevcon. It's a great scene, and the perfect warmup, but it's also worth it just to see the most beautiful venue in the most livable city in the world. You can even attend some Appsterdam events while you're in town. ;) ~ Mike Lee

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire. ~ Moshe Szulsztein