Cees Nooteboom Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There's no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.
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I firmly believe that any good journalist must essentially be temperamentally an outsider. I don't think full sense of belonging and security is conducive to creativity.
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If you've followed my career at all, you will know that I perform best in comfortable surroundings. Though other leagues may seem more enticing to other players, it's something I'm just not interested in doing personally.
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With ladder matches, you can't expect anything other than craziness.
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I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.
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I never got into politics for it to be a career.
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I did every job under the sun from bartending to ushering to temping.
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A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.
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A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
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I am thankful to the Nobel committee for recognising the plight of millions of children who are suffering in this modern age.
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Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.
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We women are going to bring change. We are speaking up for girls' rights, but we must not behave like men, like they have done in the past.
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Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
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How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
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I can't deal with someone wanting to take a relationship backward or needing space or cheating on you.
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Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us.
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My music lives because of real players.
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When someone becomes successful or rich and famous, people perceive that person as being different. But I'm the same guy I've always been.
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We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
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The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying.
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That evening, I played piano for ten thousand barely-out-of-their-teens boys who filled the Kabul stadium. Boys with pimples and crew cuts in oversized military uniforms, holding on to their toy guns. Toy guns that killed. I played as if there was no tomorrow. Because for many of them there wouldn’t be, other than inside a coffin draped with a Soviet flag.
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Each must discover his own way in life, and that way lies in his heart. Let him delve deeply into the depths of his being; his true centre is not far from there.
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The world is a never-ending cross-reference.
