Cees Nooteboom Quotes

#1. There is no more pressure on my rudder, he once remarked. Plain sailing, no drag on other people either. A bit of dancing now and then, that's fine. I still see those girls, but I pretend they're paintings. Or advertisements. But that was only later.

Cees Nooteboom

#2. Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.

Cees Nooteboom

#3. He regarded life as a rather odd club of which he had accidentally become a member and from which one could be expelled without reasons having to be supplied. He had already decided to leave the club if the meetings should become all too boring. But how boring is boring?

Cees Nooteboom

#4. I am a hindrance to the world, and the world is a hindrance to me.

Cees Nooteboom

#5. Through men ... you learn how the world is. Through women you learn what it is.

Cees Nooteboom

#6. Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.

Cees Nooteboom

#7. The world is a never-ending cross-reference.

Cees Nooteboom

#8. Man has been thrown into the world. It had always made him think of Icarus and those other great tumblers, Ixion, Phaeton, Tantalus - all these jumpers without parachutes from a world of gods and heroes.

Cees Nooteboom

#9. Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.

Cees Nooteboom

#10. Same hour, same set-up: woman plus tortoise, tortoise plus hibiscus, man plus gin and tonic. "To arm myself against the evening."
She had found it perplexing, a man who feared the evening because he feared the night.

Cees Nooteboom

#11. I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.

Cees Nooteboom

#12. As far as he could see, the world was moving, in an orderly capitalist fashion, toward a logical, perhaps provisional, perhaps permanent, end.

Cees Nooteboom

#13. We are our secrets, and, if all goes well, we will take them with us to where no-one can touch them.

Cees Nooteboom

#14. Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair.

Cees Nooteboom

#15. I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist.

Cees Nooteboom

#16. She had nothing to do all day ... but did it with the greatest possible speed.

Cees Nooteboom

#17. Have you ever seen a woman canter over the hills in the twilight? Scandal sheets are no match for atavism.

Cees Nooteboom

#18. Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.

Cees Nooteboom