Cees Nooteboom Quotes

#1. Much more than a 20th-century village storyteller, Cees Nooteboom stands as an impressive and inimitable voice among contemporary writers.

Linda Simon

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

#4. We are all sorry for something. It's what makes us human, says Seda. But sometimes empathy is not enough. Sometimes empathy needs to be followed by action.

Aline Ohanesian

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

#7. No woman should say, "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be?

Maria Mitchell

#8. I thought I was going to be like Kevin Spacey in college.

Billy Eichner

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

#11. I am a tree in the forest, moving very slowly, only barely touched by the wind. Everyone else just moves past me, and I watch them go, because I cannot be moved from who I am.

Ned Hayes

#12. Anybody can quit. Only a real champion and a person of character and strength can keep going and refuse to give up.

Sadie Robertson

#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. 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

#15. Traveling equals having experiences which translate into more opportunities for exposing incorrect ideas about life.

John Duover

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

#22. Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.

Marcus Aurelius

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

Cees Nooteboom

#24. 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

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

Cees Nooteboom

#26. Who is an aam aadmi? AAP believes that the middle class is part of the aam aadmi, anyone who is tired of this corrupt system is aam aadmi.

Arvind Kejriwal

#27. 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