Miriam Toews Quotes

Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.

— Miriam Toews

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

“... just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“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

“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

If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.

— Miriam Toews

“Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?”

— Miriam Toews

“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

— Miriam Toews

“It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.”

— Miriam Toews

“There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“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

“All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment.”

— Miriam Toews

“I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit.”

— Miriam Toews

“There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.”

— Miriam Toews

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

“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

“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

“When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“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

When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.

— Miriam Toews

I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds.

— Miriam Toews

“It's impossible to move through the stages of grief when a person is both dead and alive, the way Min is. It's like she's living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane. Sometimes I tell myself that I'd do anything for Min. That I'd do whatever was necessary for her to be happy. Except that I'm not entirely sure what that would be.”

— Miriam Toews

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

“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

“Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?”

— Miriam Toews

I heard Tash say: Nomi, you're sad man. Get a grip. Walk away. What have I taught you? And I thought: You taught me that some people can leave and some can't and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those you can't and I'm one of the ones who can't because you're one of the ones who did and there's this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much.

— Miriam Toews

“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

My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!

— Miriam Toews

Remember what mom used to say? Shred the guilt.

— Miriam Toews

“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

“I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say:
Bad shit at home? You guys are running away?
Yeah, I said.
I understand, said, Noehmi.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named-when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.”

— Miriam Toews

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

But there is a kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don't know what to say.

— Miriam Toews

She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, saga eventually - because the organs aren't so hot anymore either - and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as panful or even more painful than the grief itself.

— Miriam Toews

“You still have to eat.”

— Miriam Toews

“She lived in her head and that's why it glowed.”

— Miriam Toews

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

“I said. I'm a maid. I'm a dancer, she said. She stuck her elbows out and snapped her fingers. Well, I said. I get paid. Well, she said. I get applause. Well, I said. I get paid and with that money I rent an apartment and buy food. And a television. Well, she said. I get applause and with that affirmation of my amazing talent I feel happy and confident and cool. Well, I said. Enjoy your life as a dancer. Well, she said. Enjoy your life as a maid. Thanks, I will, I said. Good, she said. We walked in grim silence towards something else.”

— Miriam Toews

“He would be admitting to himself that life has suddenly become very short, very precious, that soon he'll no longer exist, that it'll be over. Of course he knew that, we know that, we say it, but to really, really know it, to be certain of it, is more than he can be right now. His bed is safe. Sleep is easy. He's not a stupid man.”

— Miriam Toews

“Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she'd read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of 40-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly see, and although he was told that life would be amazing for him then, after the operation it was awful. The world depressed him, its flaws, its duplicity, its rot and grime and sadness, everything hideous now made manifest, everything drab and flaking. He sank into a depression and quickly died. 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 like trap.”

— Miriam Toews

“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

“I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me.”

— Miriam Toews

“David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ...”

— Miriam Toews