A Quote by John Green

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center. — © John Green
Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.
Learn what not to expect. Irish catholic they get sh**** little rings. Irish women get crappy rings. Baptist get the worst because they get the rings under water. When it comes up, it's garbage. Jewish, big rings. Episcopalian big rings. Italians-the best, because they get them off of dead people, and second wives get the biggest rings of all.
My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.
Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God.
Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
Trouble results when the speed of growth exceeds the speed of nurturing human resources. To use the analogy of growth rings in a tree, when unusually rapid growth caused the rings to grow abnormally thick, the tree trunk weakens and is easily broken.
I don't get tired. I get beat up. You keep chopping on a tree, you need to give the tree some rest so the chlorophyll will fill back up and the tree gets its energy back.
Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center of Amsterdam during World War 2.) an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.
What is the art experience about? Really, I'm not interested in making Art at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word Art, it's almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.
When you chop down a tree you can look at the rings and see what the tree's been through. That's what you can do when you listen to my records.
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'.
I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.
The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking world-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes.
Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
My son is a tree surgeon and gets me a lovely tree. I like to put it up early, as I can't wait for Christmas. We dress it with decorations that have been in the family for years.
I'm a centrist. There is a lot going on socially that I don't like, but I feel that in a democracy you work from the center, not because I like the center - I'm a marginalized person politically - but because the center is where things get done.
When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.
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