Amsterdam Stories Quotes

“My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Oh but to write what you think is so amazing- whoosh, whoosh, you don't even know how you're doing it and suddenly there it is, exactly the way it has to be. And when you read it later you're right back in your earlier life again and yet you don't know if you're yourself or someone else.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“And so the little poet poetized away his never-ending poem and even the silliest woman could poetize with him. But they couldn't be together. And maybe that was what made it so beautiful.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“God's throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they're really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: "That's good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I'm sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I'm only God."
And So everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“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, Amsterdam Stories

“The unknown doesn’t bother me. I nod now and then to the beautiful women plucking the flowers in my gardens and I hear the wind rustling through the high pines, through the forests of certainty, of knowing that all this exists whenever I decide to think it. I am grateful that this has been given to me. And I puff on my pipe in all humility and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself. I sit there aimlessly, God’s aim is aimlessness.

But to keep this awareness always is granted to no man”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“God lives in my head. His fields are immeasurable, his gardens are full of beautiful flowers that never die, regal women walk there naked, thousands of them. And the sun rises and sets and shines low and high and low again and the endless domain is endlessly itself and never the same for an instant. Broad rivers run through it, curving and meandering, and the sun shines on them and they carry the light to the sea.
I sit quiet and content beside the rivers of my thoughts and smoke a clay pipe and feel the sunshine on my body and see the water flow ceaselessly into the unknown.
The unknown doesn’t bother me. I nod now and then to the beautiful women plucking the flowers in my gardens and I hear the wind rustling through the high pines, through the forests of certainty, of knowing that all this exists whenever I decide to think it. I am grateful that this has been given to me. And I puff on my pipe in all humility and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself.
I sit there aimlessly, God’s aim is aimlessness.

But to keep this awareness always is granted to no man.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Only God doesn't need anything. That is precisely the fundamental difference between God and us.

- Young Titans”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn't turn into night.

- The Freeloader”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“All through the night the sun that you couldn't see slid past in the north and the last light of day slid past in the north with it and turned into the first light of the new morning. One day touched the next, the way they always do in June.

- The Freeloader”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“I am nothing and I do nothing. Actually I do much too much. I'm busy overcoming the body. The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people. I don't think either. It's too bad I have to eat and sleep. I'd rather spend all night just sitting.

- The Freeloader”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Koekebakker, I feel so strange inside.' 'Well you certainly smell like jenever,' I said. 'No,' Japi said, ' it's not the jenever. I think my soul is too big.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water--the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand, and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop--no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“...I sit there aimlessly, God's aim is aimlessness.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“WE WERE kids - but good kids. If I may say so myself. We're much smarter now, so smart it's pathetic.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“But these aren’t the first eventful times I have lived through and if I’m granted even more years then with God’s help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won’t have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.”

Eventful times. What remains from Italy’s eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante’s Inferno?

Do. As if I haven’t had enough pointless doing. Oh they have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“... "They don’t ask you first, they just do it. But by God they haven’t heard the last from us. One day we will stand up firm and steadfast again for what was always worth bothering about but never mattered to them.

Everything went so differently from how we thought. That the world didn’t care much about us—we all understood that a long time ago. But we still thought, for a while longer, that it was up to us to make the silent course of things take their course."

- The End (1937)”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“The little poet had had enough. He had one good thing left:

My dead heart is so hard to bear ...

But he threw it into the kitchen stove. There was no fire in the fireplace since it was summer.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“What you’ve worked so hard to make your own— what you love—disappears or changes into something unrecognizable: landscapes and waterscapes, roads, bridges, buildings, villages and cities, people too. They don’t ask you first, they just do it.

- The End (1937)”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“I stand in the valley [of obligations] on a slag heap next to a small pile of scrap wood and a broken wash kettle. And I look up and see myself sitting up there, and I howl like a dog in the night.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“She wants to work, not think. But I don't believe she'll ever stifle her soul. Those dear to God's heart above all others have to bear that burden to the end.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Language is poor, fatally poor. Anyone who knows the Father's work knows that”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“God carries us up to the heights only to hurl us back down again. The path over the summit is short but the valleys are long. Anyone who has been to the mountaintop spends the rest of his days in misery.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“But since he was a true little poet something had to be missing. What is anything that a true little poet actually has ever worth to him?”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Man's fate is to feel regret when he fails to reach his goal and to feel regret when he succeeds.

"There is no consolation in virtue and no consolation in sin.

"Therefore, cheerfully renounce all expectations. Place your hope in eternity: there is no awakening from this dream."

- Litte Poet”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“There you were, [Japi] said, hurtling on this earth through the icy blackness of space, where night never ends, the sun had disappeared never to rise again. The earth raced on through the darkness, the icy wind howling behind it. All those heavenly bodies hurtling through space. If one of them hurtles into you, then you're lost, lost with all the other fifteen hundred million unlucky people.

The Freeloader”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“I can't [stay out of the ocean], or just barely," Bavink said. " It's so strange having that melancholy sound behind you. It's like the Ocean wants something from me, that's what it's like. God is in there too. God is calling."

- Young Titans”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“It's just a game to God, he is everywhere and without end. He just calls.

- Young Titans”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“God was good that afternoon, and merciful. His world came in through our eyes and lived in our heads, and our thoughts went wordlessly out across the world, far beyond the horizon they went.

- Out Along the Ij”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories