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. The vain being is the really solitary being.

Berthold Auerbach

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

Cees Nooteboom

#4. maybe if everyone appreciated good whiskey, pretty girls and breathing a little bit more, there'd be fewer suckers out there willing to fight and die in the petty wars begun by the sharp, the mendacious and the wicked.

Jason Sheehan

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

Cees Nooteboom

#6. Between Peaks There Are Always Valleys. How You Manage Your Valley Determines How Soon You Reach Your Next Peak.

Spencer Johnson

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

Cees Nooteboom

#8. I need someone who is willing to watch me brave the ocean and then dare me not to drown.

Colleen Hoover

#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 don't think being an athlete is unfeminine. I think of it as a kind of grace.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

#12. Thinking consists in envisaging, realizing structural features and structural requirements; proceeding in accordance with, and determined by, these requirements; thereby changing the situation in the direction of structural improvements.

Max Wertheimer

#13. I'm a little tired. I haven't been out for more than five or six weeks in the States, and that's really a lot for me. You know, to me, music is important, it's the way I make my living and I like it and I enjoy playing. But it's not the most important thing in my life - that's my family.

Joe Pass

#14. You can never love anyone to your own detriment. That is not love, that is possession, control, fear, or a combination of them all.

Iyanla Vanzant

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

Cees Nooteboom

#16. 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

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

Cees Nooteboom

#18. 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

#19. New Year's Eve to Valentine's Day is our peak season, and in many ways, Valentine's Day is our Christmas. Everybody in the world makes the same three New Year's resolutions: health, career and money, and love.

Sam Yagan

#20. We all inhabit our lives, in different ways to some degree. We see ourselves a certain way, and based on how we see ourselves, that's how we see the world.

Krishna Das

#21. Too much pleasure disagrees with us. Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to overpay our debts.

Blaise Pascal

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

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

Cees Nooteboom

#27. I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.

Austin Grossman

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

Cees Nooteboom

#29. 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

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

Cees Nooteboom

#31. 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