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“I’ve been in Amsterdam, I’ve been able to enjoy many aspects of cycling here. One thing I have not been able to do yet is bike with my sweetheart. But now that you’re here, I’m so excited to ride around town with you among all the thousands of other cyclists while I hold your wrist or you hold mine.”
― In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist – A Love Letter to Dutch Cycling Culture and History
― In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist – A Love Letter to Dutch Cycling Culture and History
“I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined with tall, stepped houses; the old Hortus Botanicus and the beautiful seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue; the Rembrandtplein with its open-air cafés; the fresh herrings sold in the streets and eaten on the spot; and the general atmosphere of cordiality and openness which seemed peculiar to the city.”
― On the Move: A Life
― On the Move: A Life
“So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!”
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“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
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“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.”
― The Fault in Our Stars
― The Fault in Our Stars
Ele’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ele’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
179 books
|
83 friends
49 books
|
23 friends
427 books
|
63 friends
43 books
|
53 friends
129 books
|
17 friends
11 books
|
38 friends
88 books
|
80 friends
13 books
|
47 friends
More friends…
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