Top 100 Marieke Nijkamp Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Love me or hate me if you want, I don’t care. But do it for all that I am, with all that I am.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

2. “You’re my best friend. I love you endless days and endless nights. You’re stuck with me.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

3. “You can’t always keep your loved ones with you. You can’t always settle your life in one place. The world was made to change. But as long as you cherish the memories and make new ones along on the way, no matter where you are, you’ll always be at home.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

4. “One step after another after another. It doesn’t matter what comes next as long as I keep moving forward.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

5. “We’re not just fighting for survival – we’re fighting for hope and a thousand tomorrows.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

6. “Fear and survival are two sides of the same coin.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

7. “The world is a messed up and scary place. It’s lonely to go through it on your own. So, you have to find your family. You have to find people who will stand by you and make you laugh until you cry, and who will hold you while you cry until you laugh again.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

8. “It’s easier to know who I’m not than to know who I am. When everyone expects me to fail, it’s easier to give up than to try.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

9. “Death is a thief... It slips into our lives and steals what we care about most. It breaks us, and even when we piece ourselves together again, the pain remains.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

10. “This is where it ends.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

11. “Together we could be so strong, but the gun has made us individuals.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

12. “Death brings life; life brings death.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

13. “I try to focus, but there’s a disconnect between my body and my mind, like nothing about it fits anymore. I don’t feel like I belong in this body, I don’t know how to interact with this world. It feels like I’m observing through a veil, and I don’t know how to move. Panic is a type of pain too.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

14. “Grief is one big, gaping hole, isn’t it? It’s everywhere and all consuming. Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

15. “I can’t shake the feeling that with every day that passes, she slips away like starlight at dawn. At.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

16. “It’s always the same thing. Other things and other people are always more important than me. And if people see me, it’s never for who I am, but only for what I can do for them.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

17. “We’re more than our mistakes. We’re more than what people expect of us.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

18. “I didn’t need to die for him to kill me.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

19. “It’s not giving up. It’s standing together, not alone. It’s facing whatever comes next. Because you believe in a cause, perhaps, but most of all, you believe in one another.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

20. “Everyone has a reason to fear the boy with the gun.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

21. “And I know the auditorium may be big enough to hold a thousand students, but it’s too small to hide just one.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

22. “We are not better because we survived. We are not brighter or more deserving. We are not stronger. But we are here. We are here, and this day will never leave us. Nor should it. We will remember the wounded. We will remember the lost.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

23. “But what they failed to tell us is that running away and saving your own skin is only noble when you don’t leave anyone behind. If I were in the auditorium, I’d want someone to come for me. I’d want there to be hope.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

24. “The only two people who matter now are in front of me- the boy who broke me and the girl who put me back together.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

25. “It doesn’t have to be a happily ever after or a happily always. Just a happily once. A happily sometimes. Hope. That’d make our pain worth it.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

26. “He spends way too much time in his own head, but he seems to like it there, so who are we to tell him otherwise? It’s not like the real world is necessarily a better place to be.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

27. “We’ll watch the stars fade and the moon disappear. We’ll watch the sun set fire to the horizon. And we’ll talk about the future one last time before it’s actually upon us.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

28. “It’d be easy to get lost here, in the spaces where I feel like a ghost. A spirit who couldn’t touch, or be touched. It’d be easy, so easy, to drown. But I keep swimming back towards the shore.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

29. “The lantern gently tugs upward. It’s warm enough, ready to be released. I hold on for one more moment. Then, around me, other lanterns are released. They float over our heads into the darkness, toward the promise of a new day. I take a deep breath and caress the rice paper between thumb and finger. And I let go.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

30. “Dad always told me there are more stories in the universe than stars in the sky. And in every story, there’s the light of hope. That’s why the seniors sent lanterns up to the sky-to make sure the darkness is never absolute.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

31. “Dad once told me that even a hopeless situation doesn’t always stop him. Not because he believes there’ll be a miracle, but because giving up feels too final.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

32. “And at some point, you discover if you’re going to be afraid anyway, you may as well do the things that scare you.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

33. “She refuses to share her grief with me – or anyone. Even when she smiles, she isn’t the girl she used to be.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

34. “I never realized that courage was so terrifying.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

35. “You can do far more than you ever imagined.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

36. “Not being able to do everything on your own doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’re as human as we all are, and we’re stronger together. We survived because we were together. Asking for help isn’t failure, it’s strength. It means you trust yourself enough to be flawed and to learn. Because here’s the secret: You don’t have to be infallible. You don’t have to know it all. No one is and no one does.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

37. “If she dies, I will never be able to tell her that she is the one who keeps me standing. That her lips taste like a promise. That she makes me want to be a better version of myself. If she dies, I will believe every ugly word Dad ever said about me.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

38. “It was the truest thing she said that night, as we both lied to each other.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

39. “She saw a future that none of us could see yet. She believed in a future, and for that, we believed in her.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

40. “Because no matter who we are, we all dream.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

41. “So we run. Not just in circles around the track. We run toward all that is waiting for us. We run together while we still can.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

42. “Here’s the thing. I never quite know if I’m responding the “right” way to anything happening around me. Should I be more scared? Should I be angrier? Should fear immobilize me? What happens around me and how my brain responds to it are two entirely different things, and I can’t tell all the time how they’re connecting.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

43. “There are no words in that fleeting moment between hope and the knowledge. There is no way to express how a heart can burst and break at the same time, how the sun can cut through the darkness but will case shadows everywhere.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

44. “Grandfather always said that stories are the heartbeat of the world, especially in Alaska. Stories shape us. They give meaning to the harshest winters and the longest summers.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

45. “It’s easier to know who I’m not than to know who I am. When.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

46. “By the third day, everyone... had passed her at least half a dozen times, and they seemed to have forgotten about her entirely. “It gives me a chance to look... from a different perspective... “.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

47. “But together we held our darkness up to the light, and it became easier to carry because we were not alone.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

48. “Dad would call it my Sisyphus toll. Push a boulder up a hill, pretending it’s okay, and come nightfall it – and I – come crashing down. But he forgets the view each time I make it to the top.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

49. “None of my doctors told me about how pain wears you down until you sometimes don’t know where physical pain stops and mental pain begins. They didn’t tell me about the anger and the fear and the helplessness. Finn told me and then, when I finally let him, held me while I let it all sink in.”

— Marieke Nijkamp

50. “But I want my life to have meaning because I give it meaning, not because someone else says that it does. I want my life to mean something because I create. Because I love. Because I make the world a better place.”

— Marieke Nijkamp