Top 100 Miriam Toews Quotes
#1. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
Miriam Toews
#2. During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that's created from decay.
Miriam Toews
#3. I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.
Miriam Toews
#4. Remember what mom used to say? "Shred the guilt.
Miriam Toews
#5. What you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behaviour on the street. You can't go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them evil when they destroy themselves. You will never walk down a street and feel a lightness come over you. You will never fly.
Miriam Toews
#6. The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cementery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.
Miriam Toews
#7. When I put the poncho on to show Elf she said farewell to arms.
Miriam Toews
#8. Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.
Miriam Toews
#9. A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.
Miriam Toews
#10. Where are they going to get a camera? I asked. I don't know, said Noehmi. They'll probably get sidetracked along the way. Or they'll come back with paint instead, or beer, or some new idea for a circus or something. They're social anarchists.
Miriam Toews
#11. I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
Miriam Toews
#12. Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!
Miriam Toews
#13. The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter.
Miriam Toews
#14. The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me.
Miriam Toews
#15. It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.
Miriam Toews
#16. Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.
Miriam Toews
#17. Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you're going. But there's nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.
Miriam Toews
#18. They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn't say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault?
Miriam Toews
#19. I have a problem with beginnings ... and endings ... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.
Miriam Toews
#20. We stopped talking for a long, long time. A long time. Nurses came and went attaching and detaching things. Hundreds of thousands of babies were born while we weren't talking. The continents continued to separate at the same page as fingernails growing.
Miriam Toews
#21. When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
Miriam Toews
#22. And I finally understand what she needs to hear and that she's talking about not just me but Elf too and I tell her that my sorrow was not created by her, that my childhood was a joyful thing, an island in the sun, that her mothering is impeccable, that she is not to blame.
Miriam Toews
#23. The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinics where assisted suicide or euthanasia is practiced, they call it 'weariness of life.'
Miriam Toews
#24. Main Street is as dead as ever. There's a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he's saying how the hell would I know? I'm just a carpenter.
Miriam Toews
#25. Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music.
Miriam Toews
#26. I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas or words that by their definition promised love.
Miriam Toews
#27. I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
Miriam Toews
#28. David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ...
Miriam Toews
#29. My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.
Miriam Toews
#30. Everytime I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really. - Nomi
Miriam Toews
#31. He says it's a condition of our relationship that I don't smoke, she says. We laugh. We are tired. Too tired to confront conditions.
Miriam Toews
#32. We were making good time now, barrelling through the bodacious curves of southeastern Utah and ignoring all impending signs of trouble with the van. At least I was.
"You guys happy?" I said.
The kids smiled at me like I was a dog chasing my tail, sweet but stupid, and looked away.
Miriam Toews
#33. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.
Miriam Toews
#34. With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
Miriam Toews
#35. She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself
Miriam Toews
#36. It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God's will. It's hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have emptiness.
Miriam Toews
#37. I could see my mother's beater Chevy way down below in the parking lot and I pushed the green button on her automatic starter to see how far away I could be from something to make it come to life. Nothing happened, no lights came on.
Miriam Toews
#38. And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.
Miriam Toews
#39. If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
Miriam Toews
#40. Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.
Miriam Toews
#41. That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.
Miriam Toews
#42. Let's not have forced gaiety this Christmas, said Nora, like it was a dish. We'll have a tiny bit of it, I said.
Miriam Toews
#43. The day before the day before my father killed himself he took my hand in his and said Yoli, it feels to me as though the lights are going out. We were sitting by a fountain in a park at soon.
Miriam Toews
#44. My words aren't only words. They're pictures and tears and imperfect offerings of love and self-inflicted shots to my brain.
Miriam Toews
#45. Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?
Miriam Toews
#46. When I opened up the bottle of wine, Thebes said whoa, you yanked that cork out of there like you were saving it from drowning. She got out her markers and drew a screaming face on the cork.
Miriam Toews
#47. I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
Miriam Toews
#48. It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
Miriam Toews
#49. I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me.
Miriam Toews
#50. I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.
Miriam Toews
#51. All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment.
Miriam Toews
#52. When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia.
Miriam Toews
#53. The idea of "working well" was a relative one for us and that in the context of our present lives my mother was right, it was absolutely fine, no problem.
Miriam Toews
#54. Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.
Miriam Toews
#55. My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit out right back out of him and filled the silent part of their lives with books and coffee and other things.
Miriam Toews
#56. In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.
Miriam Toews
#57. And all our righteousnesses are filthy rags and we all do fade as a leaf and our inequities like the wind have taken us away
Miriam Toews
#58. I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay he shouted. All right We have to get you a stick We have to get tape I'll be waiting in the car
Miriam Toews
#59. A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you
Miriam Toews
#60. There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
Miriam Toews
#61. Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place.
Miriam Toews
#62. 'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.
Miriam Toews
#63. The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
Miriam Toews
#64. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book
Miriam Toews
#65. You better write me letters. I said yeah, I will, but they'll be boring. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said, I'll try.
Miriam Toews
#66. The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
Miriam Toews
#67. A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back.
Miriam Toews
#68. Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy.
Miriam Toews
#69. Yolandi, the central character in the book "All My Puny Sorrows" says that "the core of the argument for it [assisted suicide] is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering" (p. 222).
Miriam Toews
#70. If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.
Miriam Toews
#71. 'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.
Miriam Toews
#72. That's me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she'd always been able to see but she told me she'd never adjusted to the light, she'd just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn't taken. Reality was a rusty leg trap.
Miriam Toews
#73. Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
Miriam Toews
#74. She lived in her head and that's why it glowed.
Miriam Toews
#75. I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word.
Miriam Toews
#76. At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.
Miriam Toews
#77. Maybe she was enjoying a moment in her life, a sliver of light, a flash memory of one of her kids, something sweet and approaching reality.
Miriam Toews
#78. ... just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.
Miriam Toews
#79. After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hangs. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.
Miriam Toews
#81. You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.
Miriam Toews
#83. There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
Miriam Toews
#84. I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.
Miriam Toews
#85. I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.
Miriam Toews
#86. The director said he's got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness.
Miriam Toews
#87. There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.
Miriam Toews
#88. Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.
Because I would start to love them, he said.
Miriam Toews
#89. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.
Miriam Toews
#90. Nic loves Elf's odd requests, each one is like a holiday for him ... and he's not a Mennonite, which is important
in a man
for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame.
Miriam Toews
#91. Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
Miriam Toews
#92. Conversing with children is a fine art ... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.
Miriam Toews
#93. One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.
Miriam Toews
#94. A lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.
Miriam Toews
#95. Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.
Miriam Toews
#96. We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.
Miriam Toews
#97. He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.
Miriam Toews
#98. I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit.
Miriam Toews
#99. My father died beside trees on iron rails ... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'
Miriam Toews
#100. And I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?
Miriam Toews
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