Top 35 Marieke Lucas Rijneveld Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Een dode kan niet kapot zijn, een dode is dood, niet meer dan dat. Diegene die achterblijft is kapot. In wel duizend stukjes.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

2. “Als iemand dichtbij staat of ligt krijg ik het gevoel dat ik iets moet bekennen, dat ik mij moet verantwoorden voor mijn aanwezigheid...”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

3. “We groeien op met Het Woord, maar de woorden ontbreken steeds vaker in de boerderij.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

4. “Het is verwarrend, maar volwassenen zijn vaker verwarrend, omdat hun hoofden als een Tetris-spelletje werken en al hun zorgen op de juiste plek moeten inparkeren. Als het er te veel zijn, stapelen ze zich op en loopt alles vast. Game over.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

5. “Lots of people want to run away, but the ones who really do rarely announce it beforehand: they just go.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

6. “We praten niet over alles wat we nooit meer zullen vergeten.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

7. “Sometimes I found it strange that you had to pray in the dark, although maybe it was like my glow-in-the-dark duvet: the stars and the planets only emitted light and protected you from the night when it was dark enough. God must work the same way.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

8. “I’m beginning to have more and more doubts about whether I find God nice enough to want to go and talk to Him. I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves. I think I’ll belong to that second group.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

9. “Verdriet gaat in je wervelkolom zitten.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

10. “Now summer’s coming, the stalls have to be mucked out so that they’ll be spotless for the winter. We never really live in the seasons as we’re always busy with the next one.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

11. “No one in the village liked to dwell: the crops might wither, and we only knew about the harvest that came from the land, not about things that grew inside ourselves. I breathed in Dad’s smoke so that his cares would become mine.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

12. “People need small problems in order to feel bigger.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

13. “Nobody knows my heart. It’s hidden deep side my coat, my skin, my ribs. My heart was important for nine months inside my mother’s belly, but once I left the belly, everyone stopped caring whether it beat enough times per hour. No one worries when it stops or begins to beat fast, telling me there must be something wrong.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

14. “My brother is slowly fading out of various minds, while he moves more and more into ours.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

15. “Even though it will feel uncomfortable for a while, but according to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

16. “I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

17. “Everything that’s part of you is weightless and the things that are alien feel heavy.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

18. “Boosheid heeft scharnieren die nodig geolied moeten worden.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

19. “We never really live in the seasons as we’re always busy with the next one.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

20. “Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

21. “Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother. We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are – vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

22. “I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

23. “He turned around once again in the doorway and waved to me, the scene I’d keep replaying in my mind later until his arm no longer raised itself and I began to doubt whether we had even said goodbye.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

24. “In de nacht is iedereen leeftijdsloos.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

25. “Their hands were always searching for something and if you were no longer able to hold an animal or a person tenderly, it was better to let go and turn your attention to other useful things instead.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

26. “The plastic covers crunch with every step. Dad once said, ‘Death always comes wearing clogs.’ I hadn’t understood. Why not ice skates or trainers? Now I get it: Death announces itself in most cases, but we’re often the ones who don’t want to see or hear it. We knew that the ice was too weak in some places, and we knew the foot-and-mouth wouldn’t skip our village.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

27. “I know, though, that we’d have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood – we’d have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but the time isn’t ripe for that yet.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

28. “We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are – vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

29. “I learned that at first, death requires people to pay attention to small details – the way Mum checks her nails for dried-up bits of rennet from making cheese – to delay the pain.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

30. “She knows life the way tourists know a village: they don’t know how to find the dark alleyways, the path forbidden to trespassers.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

31. “Obbe once told me that when the screen was black, the television was the eye of God, and that when Mum closed the doors she wanted Him not to see us.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

32. “She felt I was good at putting myself in another’s shoes but not so great at kicking off my own and having fun. Sometimes I’d get stuck in the other person for too long because that was easier than staying inside myself.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

33. “Later I sometimes thought that this was when the emptiness began. It wasn’t because of Matthies’s death but those two days of Christmas that were given away in pans and empty Russian salad tubs.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

34. “It’s confusing, but grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

35. “I don’t want to feel any sadness, I want action; something to pierce my days, like bursting a blister with a pin so that the pressure is eased.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

36. “I’d have preferred them to be open so that we could look at each other one more time, so that I could be sure I didn’t forget the colour of his eyes, so that he wouldn’t forget me.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

37. “More and more brown patches were appearing on her face, like the apples she’d cut up and used as mouths on the pancakes. You get overripe from old age in the end.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

38. “Even the Big Bear from my favourite picture book, who takes down the moon every night for the Little Bear who is afraid of the dark, is hibernating.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

39. “Don’t be so daft. You’re not going to die.’ She says it as though she’d begrudge it me, as though I’m not clever enough to die young.”

— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld