Quotes from 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.

maybe into a mistral, the wind that can make you crazy, so that in France you can be acquitted if you kill someone while it's blowing.

People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime.

You are ten weeks inside, the size of a kumquat, a nice dirty-sounding word, your head half the size of your body, your hands covering your heart. Protecting your heart, as though we are able to do that.

Extremist, closed communities are ripe for violence.

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.

I'd made "Fever" Mom's ring tone because the song was about getting the flu from being too close to someone. I thought it was a good choice because she holds me tight and kisses me all the time and she's always blowing her nose on me and it makes me sick and gives me fever—but now I wasn't sure it was the right ring tone after all. I didn't want to have a sexy ring tone for Mom on my cellphone!

Tash had warned me about running. It's for idiots and children.

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.

What do you mean? I don't know what you're asking me. I don't remember what I am. I am what I dream. I am what I hope for. I am what I don't remember. I am what other people want me to be. I am what my kids want me to be. I am what mom wants me to be. I am what you want me to be. What do you want me to be? Don't we need to stick around to find out what we are? What do you want me to be? Oh I don't

What's wrong with sleeping with a lawyer? I asked.

Grandma asked me if I wanted to continue our Editorial Meeting but I didn't answer. Then she asked me if I knew what bioluminescence was. I smashed breadcrumbs with my thumb and kept my piehole shut. It's one's ability to create light from within, said Grandma. Like a firefly. I think you have that, Swivchen. You have a fire inside you and your job is to not let it go out. I'm too young to have a job, I said.

They were apoplectically suspicious of higher learning—especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.

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.

because I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was

The accordion is the best instrument for mournful occasions because it is melancholy and beautiful and cumbersome and ridiculous at the same time.

It was one of the games we were allowed to play. Golf was another one because it consisted of using a rod to hit something much, much smaller than yourself and a lot of men in this town enjoyed that sort of thing.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard

work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said, I'll try. No, Yoli, said Elf, better than that. She yanked on my arms. Please. You have to. I'm counting on you.

Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy.

When she looked at me she saw a child surrounded by flames, screaming. And that must have been hard for her.

we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.

But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our