Cees Nooteboom Quotes

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Dog, Memories, Lying

  "Rituals". Book by Cees Nooteboom, 1980.

  46 Copy quote

• Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair.

  Cees Nooteboom

  Men, Hair, Mammals

  6 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Doe, Conversation

  6 Copy quote

• The world is a never-ending cross-reference.

  Cees Nooteboom

  World, Crosses, Never Ending

  "The Following Story". Book by Cees Nooteboom, 1991.

  9 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Order, Needs, Body

  Cees Nooteboom (2013). “Rituals”, p.88, Hachette UK

  9 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Men, World

  8 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Life, World, Hindrance

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Fashion, Moving

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Hero, Men, Thinking

  34 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Life, People, Coward

  Cees Nooteboom (2013). “Rituals”, p.38, Hachette UK

  7 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Life, Speed

  9 Copy quote

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

  Cees Nooteboom

  Talking, Helping, Language

  "The Foxes Come at Night by Cees Nooteboom - review" by Alberto Manguel, www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Zoos, Animal, Should Have

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Clubs, Boring

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Book, Fate

  7 Copy quote

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