Nooteboom Cees Quotes & Sayings

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

I am a hindrance to the world, and the world is a hindrance to me. — Cees Nooteboom

When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, If you had to retain everything, you'd explode. There's simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time. — Cees Nooteboom

Can you imagine how incredibly quiet it was everywhere, when the gentlemen from this world" - he made a vague circular gesture towards the battalions of meditating Asians behind him - "were hatching and proclaiming their ideas? Anyone who now tries to follow these ideas in order to find the road back to what they were talking about, is faced with obstacles that would have driven an entire tribe of oriental ascetics into the ravine. The world from which they felt it so necessary to retreat would have seemed idyllic to us. We live in a vision of hell, and we have actually got used to it." He looked at his statues and continued, "We have become different people. We still look the same, but we have nothing in common with them any more. We are differently programmed. Anyone who now wants to become like them must acquire a big dose of madness first; otherwise he will no longer be able to bear the life of our world. We are not designed for their kind of life. — Cees Nooteboom

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

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

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here. — John Cassavetes

I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist. — Cees Nooteboom

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

I could have forced myself to adapt," said Taads. "In this world the individual self is of such importance that it is allowed to become absorbed in itself and to grub around in its trivial personal history for years on end with the help of a psychiatrist, so as to be able to cope. But I don't think that is important enough. And then suicide is no longer a disgrace. If I had done it earlier, I would have done it in hatred, but that is no longer the case."
"Hatred?"
"I used to hate the world. People, smells, dogs, feet, telephones, newspapers, voices - everything filled me with the greatest disgust. I have always been afraid I might murder somebody. Suicide is when you have been all around the world with your fear and your aggression and you end up by yourself again."
"It remains aggression."
"Not necessarily."
"What are you waiting for then?"
"For the right moment. The time has not yet come." He said it amiably, as if he were talking to a child. — Cees Nooteboom

I looked out of the window and saw him sitting in the early rays of the sun, a dark silhouette in the sand, motionless as a rock, and knew at once that I had substituted one memory for another and that this one would leave me with as little peace as the other one had. I would exist in someone else's mind, without knowing who I was in there. — Cees Nooteboom

Through men ... you learn how the world is. Through women you learn what it is. — Cees Nooteboom

Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say. — Cees Nooteboom

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. — Niccolo Machiavelli

When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!"
The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni.
"But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all. — Cees Nooteboom

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

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

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

All right, she thought I was a funny little geezer, but my charred Phaethon had impressed her, I was very obviously available, and she was out for revenge. What makes Greek tragedies great is that this brand of psychological nonsense doesn't enter into it at all. I had wanted to tell her that too, but unfortunately conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say. We are descendents, we do not have mythical lives, but psychological ones. And we know everything, we are always our own chorus. — Cees Nooteboom

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

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

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

Love was one of those feelings that you could never control. — Cecelia Ahern

Look at you, glowing like a solar fire. You're something special... You're going to rattle the stars, you are. — Walt Disney Company

Beau, will you please watch the entrance for us?"
"What should I do if I see anyone suspicious?"
"Kick a car," Iain said.
"Kick a car?"
"To set off the alarm."
"Gotcha," Beau said. "Good thinking. — Kirsten Miller

He thought that, unlike most people, he had simply refused to let himself be brainwashed by newspapers, television, eschatologies, and philosophies into believing that "in spite of everything" this was an acceptable world simply because it existed. It would never become acceptable. Beloved maybe, acceptable never. — Cees Nooteboom

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

The psychobabble spelled out in magazines, the imaginary divans we would never wish to lie on ourselves, all they do is hold up mirrors in which not a single truth is revealed, because the truth is always trounced by the lie. Was Heinz a liar by saying nothing? Did he drink because he never stopped telling lies? — Cees Nooteboom

Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases. — Cees Nooteboom

So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out. — Cees Nooteboom

Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair. — Cees Nooteboom

The world is a never-ending cross-reference. — Cees Nooteboom

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. — T.H. White

Know for a certainty that if men understood how terrible is even one solitary sin, they would rather be cast into a heated furnace, and there remain, living both in soul and body, than to support such a sight. And if the sea were all fire they would cast themselves therein and never leave it, if they were certain of meeting the sin on doing so. — Catherine Of Genoa

She had nothing to do all day ... but did it with the greatest possible speed. — Cees Nooteboom