Quotes from Miriam Toews

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.

It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.

She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.

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.

Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals, and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals. But not all men, says Mejal. Ona clarifies: Perhaps not men, per se, but a pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of the men's hearts and minds.

One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.

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.

Most of us, she said, absolve ourselves of responsibility for change by sentimentalizing our pasts.

to survive something we first need to know what it is we are surviving

What sorts of things do you google when your favorite person in the world is determined to leave it?

And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.

In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We'd been through all of this before. 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.

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

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

She was a strange, unsettled planet that had had once sustained life. She was a language that I had thought I almost understood even though I couldn't speak it. She hadn't always been this way. She used to wear high knee socks and short shorts and tube tops, and travel everywhere on roller skates.

He looked sad and happy at the same time. That's a popular adult look. Because adults are busy and have to do everything at once, even feel things.

Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?

You put the fist in pacifist?

She says Mom does the emotional work for the whole family, feeling everything ten times harder than is necessary so the rest of us can act normal.

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

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.

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

My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!

Remember what mom used to say? "Shred the guilt.