The Discomfort of Evening

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People need small problems in order to feel bigger.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In de nacht is iedereen leeftijdsloos.

some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.

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.

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.

Just normal,' Mum says, 'I'm just normal.' No, I think to myself, my mum's anything but normal. Even the omelette she's making right now is anything but normal. There are bits of eggshell in it and it's stuck to the bottom of the frying pan, and both the white and the yolk have dried out. She's stopped using butter and she's forgotten the salt and pepper again.