Quotes from Miriam Toews

No, no, said the librarian, forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it.

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

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.

They stole it from us. It was. . .our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need. . .not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative. . .to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.

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.

Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It's the same for thinking, writing, and life.

I grappled with the idea of explaining hemispheres to her, how we are required to share the sun with other parts of the world, that if one were to observe the earth from outer space one could see as many as fifteen sunsets and sunrises in a day—and that perhaps by sharing the sun the world could learn to share everything, learn that everything belonged to everyone!

W]hat makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing—which is that life goes on.

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.

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, 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.

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.

The guy's name was Colt. Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse? I guess, said the guy, or a gun. Well, which do you prefer? she said. What do you mean? he asked. Like, how do you prefer to think of yourself? As a baby, male horse? No, he said, he didn't really like to think of himself that way. Well, then, as a gun? she said. No, not really, he said. He preferred basically not to think of himself at all.

It's impossible to move through the stages of grief when a person is both dead and alive, the way Min is. It's like she's living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane. Sometimes I tell myself that I'd do anything for Min. That I'd do whatever was necessary for her to be happy. Except that I'm not entirely sure what that would be.

You'll know for yourself what to fight. Grandma told me fighting can be making peace. She said sometimes we move forward by looking back and sometimes the onward can be knowing when to stop.

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.

forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it. That's your feeling, she added, your internal logic. You've just explained that to me.

I don't know now why I let her believe otherwise, but someday, perhaps, it will be clear.

If you lose your mind can you find your mind again? Of course you can. That's life!

I have videos of Grandma on my cellphone. In one I asked her what will happen to her body after she dies. She says ahhhhh, my body! My body will become energy that will light your path.

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. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.

We stopped talking for a long, long time. A long time. Nurses came and went attaching and detaching things. Hundreds of thousands of babies were born while we weren't talking. The continents continued to separate at the same page as fingernails growing.

Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.

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.

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.