Miriam Toews Quotes

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.

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

Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.

I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.

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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.

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.

Followed her out the door and watched her walk down the road towards home, hers, and the bright yard light, and her own bed, and our parents, and I stood there for a long time because I didn't know where else to go.
I stood there long enough to feel the chill of the night. The sky was a blanket of stars.Indifferent.
I repeated the ancient song of Nezahualcoytl. I stood there long enough to hear my family singing. Why were they singing at two in the morning? I heard the hight, creaky voice of my mother and the off-key but persistent voices of my little brothers.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

Salome interrupts. We're not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator's note: Salome didn't use the word "patriarchy" - I inserted it in the place of Salome's curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as "talking through the flowers"), where the women live our their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche. We are commodities.

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.

'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.

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.

When negative experiences such as having one's house shot at occur in my dad's life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life's puzzle fuse into meaning like the continents before that colossal rift. It's entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he's able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus schedule that we've had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.


But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren't happening and he'd be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two and he'd probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and ARRANGE it on there so you'd know it was the centerpiece of his life.

Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context.

You always say oh, that's so unprofessional as though there's some definition of professional that's also a moral imperative for how to behave.

Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself

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.

It was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let's get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.

Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging on to the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them.

Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.

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

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.

Ona protests, quietly, that she doesn't believe that at all. She doesn't believe in authority, period, because authority makes people cruel.
Salome interrupts: The people with authority or the people without?

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

I told her [...] that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that she could control her life, that I understood that pain is sometimes psychic, not only physical, that she wanted nothing more than to end it and to sleep forever, that for her life was over but that for me it was still ongoing and that an aspect of it was trying to save her, that the notion of saving her was one that we didn't agree on, that I was willing to do whatever she wanted me to do but only if it was absolutely true that there were no other doors to find, to push against or storm because if there were I'd break every bone in my body running up against that fucking door repeatedly, over and over and over and over.

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.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

We drank our coffee and talked a little bit more about practical things. Natalie came over and asked me if I knew what the trees were called. I said no. She told me they were jacarandas. She said one March two years ago she was feeling suicidal. She had planned to step in front of a bus. Then she looked at the jacaranda tree and changed her mind.
You decided to hang yourself from it instead? I said.

Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don't know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred percent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health -- to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will me my failure, not yours. I am the professional. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain. I am absolutely committed to your care... I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid, I love you. I want to cure you and I won't stop trying to help you. You are my patient. I am your doctor. You are my patient. Imagine a doctor phoning you at all hours of the day and night to tell you that he or she had been reading some new stuff on the subject of whatever and was really excited about how it might help you. Imagine a doctor calling you in an important meeting and saying listen, I'm so sorry to bother you but I"ve been thinking really hard about your problems and I'd like to try something completely new. I need to see you immediately! I"m absolutely committed to your care! I think this might help you. I won't give up on you.

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

That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.

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.

All we women have are our dreams – so of course we are dreamers.

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

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.'

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?

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.

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.

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.

No, Ernie, says Agata, there's no plot, we're only women talking.

My words aren't only words. They're pictures and tears and imperfect offerings of love and self-inflicted shots to my brain.

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

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.

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.

You still have to eat.

My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.

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

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.

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).

There must be satisfaction gained in accurately naming the thing that torments you.

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.

I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what's that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that's from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn't dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things he didn't ever want to talk about and they were sex and Russia.

... the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty.

And what have you been up to? she asked.
Oh, I don't know really, I said. Not much. Learning how to be a good loser.

Perhaps all of us are crazy, Ona says. Of course we're all crazy, says Mejal. How can we not be?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The director said he's got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness.

Okay, I said, what's so hot about playing the piano?
She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build - I was writing it down as fast as I could - and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end.

I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Books are what save us. Books are what don't save us.

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.

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.

For a few seconds I thought about my little brothers who loved connecting things with rope. I wondered if I'd ever see them again and a torpedo of sadness struck me and moved straight trough my body.