Southwold, Walberswick and Aldburgh

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

(Albert Einstein)

"When I see a white sheet of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything."

(Ellsworth Kelly) 

Flatford and Pin Mill

"There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful."

(John Constable)

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

(Pablo Picasso)

Florence

"Children are living beings-more than grown-up people who have built shells around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love."

(Rabindranath Tagore)

"One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun."

(Jane Goodall)

Amsterdam

"Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town."

(James Weldon Johnson)

"In Amsterdam the water is the mistress and the land the vassal. Throughout the city there as many canals and drawbridges as bracelets on a gypsy's bronzed arm."

(Felix Marti-Ibanez)

Tulips

"Like Tulip-beds of different shape and dyes,

Bending beneath the invisible west-wind's sighs."

(Thomas Moore)

"How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with new born vigour!"

(Colette)

London

"And marbled clouds go scudding by

The many-steepled London sky."

(John Betjeman)

"I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?"

(Charlotte Bronte)

Seville

"For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her."

(Earnest Hemingway)

"I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain."

(George Orwell)

Florence

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

(W B Yeates)

"But from the start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am", and forms the core of personality."

(Diana Gabaldon)