Miriam Toews famous quotes

03-17-2025

Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
-- Miriam Toews

#Beautiful #Lying #Helping
I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.
-- Miriam Toews

#Mean #Ashes #Stories
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

#Art #Honesty #Children
David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .
-- Miriam Toews

#Masters #Prose
If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.
-- Miriam Toews

#Pain #Heart #Focus
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

#Enemy #Firsts #Problem
There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
-- Miriam Toews

#Depression #Dark #Mirrors
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

#Sadness #Home #Thinking
Itâ€™s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is Godâ€™s will. Itâ€™s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when youâ€™re not supposed to have emptiness.
-- Miriam Toews

#Grieving #Towns #Emptiness
But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
-- Miriam Toews

#Weed #Grief #Mushrooms
It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
-- Miriam Toews

#Rain #Persons
We Poor Cousins donâ€™t care at all though, exceptÂ for when weâ€™re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy coolÂ high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition orÂ purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. But whatever, we descendants of the GirlÂ Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our draftyÂ homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
-- Miriam Toews

#Girl #Cousin #Children
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
-- Miriam Toews

#Road Trip #Window #Rhythm
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

#Uncles #Dad #Disappointment
Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.
-- Miriam Toews

#Strong #Laughter #Forgiving
The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.
-- Miriam Toews

#Mother #Dad #Black And White
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

#Body #Disease #Would Be
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

#Powerful #Wall #Blood
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

#Life #Understanding #Stones
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

#Fun #Fall #Together
If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
-- Miriam Toews

#Way #Lost
...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

#Sun #Plant #Sun Rise
Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.
-- Miriam Toews

#Dream #Revenge #Just A Dream
Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
-- Miriam Toews

#Asking #Oneself
She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself
-- Miriam Toews

#Expectations #Joy #Becoming
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

#Boys #Lakes #Air

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