Cees Nooteboom Quotes

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

~ 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

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

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

~ Cees Nooteboom

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