Quotes from Miriam Toews

You're a small thing and you must learn to fight.

Did you know, she says, that the migration period of butterflies and dragonflies is so long that it is often only the grandchildren who arrive at the intended destination.

On the days she gets the death calls she grabs at me when I walk past her and I know she wants affection, but I hate always having to be the embodiment of life.

Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson's notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction.

Everything will be all right in the end and if it's not all right then it's not the end.

after hearing my mom's survival dream I think maybe this is my survival dream and it's not a nightmare. It's the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we're surviving.

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.

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

Nomi: someday you'll be gone, you'll be dust, and then even less than dust. Nothing. There's no other place to be. This world is good enough for you because it has to be. Go ahead and love it.

the idea of "working well" was a relative one for us and that in the context of our present lives my mother was right, it was absolutely fine, no problem.

learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.

What's a little inferno in your bonnet.

Tal y como yo lo veo, lo que hemos decidido las mujeres es que queremos, y creemos merecer, tres cosas. ¿Cuáles?, pregunta Greta. Mariche dice: Queremos que nuestros hijos estén seguros. Ha empezado a llorar en silencio y está costándole hablar, pero continúa. Queremos ser fieles a nuestra fe. Queremos pensar.

Everything in life, except her kids, made her impatient. She had tried to do a million things. She'd wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and then a painter and then a tiny-ceramic-figure maker. None of it panned out. She'd be full of enthusiasm at first, full of big ideas and energy and drive, but it would all gradually evaporate and disappear. She could never maintain the momentum or the concentration or the confidence she needed to get anything done.

We loved each other. We fought for each other. When worlds collapsed we were buried in the rubble together and when we were dug out of the rubble and rescued we all celebrated together.

Someone has been sawing off all the branches of the tree outside my dining room window. I like to sit in my T-shirt and panties at the dining room table first thing in the morning and listen to the uneaten mourning doves and write. The branches covered virtually the entire window and prevented the neighbors from seeing me sitting here in my underwear. But now the branches are coming away one by one and revealing me to my neighbors slowly like a puzzle taking shape.

plane. I was trying to act tough but I truly believed that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away, to the extent that I had written a secret will, bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone.

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.

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

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 lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.

You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.

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.

Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.