Amsterdam Stories Quotes

“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

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

- Young Titans”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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