Miriam Toews > Quotes

“Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself.”
― Miriam Toews

“Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“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, All My Puny Sorrows

“Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“…just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“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, All My Puny Sorrows

“Sadness is what holds our bones in place.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote "If you love someone, set them free" he can't have been directing his advice at human beings.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Freedom is good... [i]t's better than slavery. And forgiveness is good, better than revenge. And hope for the unknown is good, better than hatred of the familiar.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“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, A Complicated Kindness

“No, Ernie, says Agata, there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“There must be satisfaction gained in accurately naming the thing that torments you.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“All we women have are our dreams – so of course we are dreamers.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. The way it does. But it exhausted me, like a seizure.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“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, A Complicated Kindness

“None of us have ever asked the men for anything, Agata states. Not a single thing, not even for the salt to be passed, not even for a penny or a moment alone or to take the washing in or to open a curtain or to go easy on the small yearlings or to put your hand on the small of my back as I try, again, for the twelfth or thirteenth time, to push a baby out of my body.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“...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, A Complicated Kindness

“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, A Complicated Kindness

“And then I thought that people like to talk about their pain and loneliness but in disguised ways. Or in ways that are sort of organized but not really. I realized that when I try to start conversations with people, just strangers on the street or in the grocery store, they think I’m exposing my pain or loneliness in the wrong way and they get nervous. But then I saw the impromptu choir repeating the line about everyone having holes in their lives, and so beautifully, so gently and with such acceptance and even joy, just acknowledging it, and I realized that there are ways to do it, just not the ones that I’d been trying.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“We are not members, . . . we are commodities. . . . When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“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, A Complicated Kindness

“By leaving, we are not necessarily disobeying the men according to the Bible, because we, the women, do not know exactly what is in the Bible, being unable to read it. Furthermore, the only reason why we feel we need to submit to our husbands is because our husbands have told us that the Bible decrees it.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“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, A Complicated Kindness

“... the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking