Quotes from Miriam Toews

Surely, she says, encouraging others to lie on our behalves must be a worse sin than lying ourselves.

Yolandi, the central character in the book All My Puny Sorrows says that "the core of the argument for it [assisted suicide] is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering" (p. 222).

Perhaps all of us are crazy, Ona says. Of course we're all crazy, says Mejal. How can we not be?

She is not crying, she says, she is moisturizing

We were making good time now, barrelling through the bodacious curves of southeastern Utah and ignoring all impending signs of trouble with the van. At least I was. You guys happy? I said. The kids smiled at me like I was a dog chasing my tail, sweet but stupid, and looked away.

Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound?

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 men's hearts and minds.

He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.

My words aren't only words. They're pictures and tears and imperfect offerings of love and self-inflicted shots to my brain.

They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn't say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault?

The truth is, I don't have a catchy method of conversing and yet, unfortunately, suffer on a minute-to-minute basis the agony of the unexpressed thought.

Between 2005-2009, more than 300 girls and women of Molotschna were made unconscious and attacked in their own beds. On average, an attack occurred every three or four days. Finally, Leisl Neustandter forced herself to stay awake night after night until she caught a young man prying open her bedroom window, holding a jug of belladonna spray in one hand. Leisl and her adult daughter wrestled the man to the ground and tied him up with baler twine.

I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word.

How should we know what they're guilty of or not? says Mariche. But we do know, says Ona. We do know that the conditions of Molotschna have been created by man, that these attacks have been made possible, even the conception of these acts, the planning of these attacks, the rationale for these attacks within the minds of the men, because of the circumstances of Molotschna. And those circumstances have been created and ordained by the men, by the elders and by Peters.

Maybe she was enjoying a moment in her life, a sliver of light, a flash memory of one of her kids, something sweet and approaching reality.

When I was living alone in Montreal, heartbroken over a lost love, she sent me a quote from Paul Valéry. One word per letter, though, so it took me months to figure out. Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm… you will triumph.

Main Street is as dead as ever. There's a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he's saying how the hell would I know? I'm just a carpenter.

August's list of good things: Sun. Stars. Pails. Birth. The harvest. Numbers. Sounds. Window. Straw. Frint. Beams. Futility. My mother. My father. Language. Flies. Manure. Wind. Women.

The pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself.

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?

To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy. Even poor old Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that's saying something. You might say that God is an absurd concept but faith in God's goodness. . .I find joy in that. I find it inspiring.

My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.

I find it curious that she hasn't been excommunicated. Are her small acts of rebellion a convenient outlet for Peters, a type of performance that satisfies the colonists' need to assert themselves, and that allows Peters to act with impunity on a larger scale?

We drank our coffee and talked a little bit more about practical things. Natalie came over and asked me if I knew what the trees were called. I said no. She told me they were jacarandas. She said one March two years ago she was feeling suicidal. She had planned to step in front of a bus. Then she looked at the jacaranda tree and changed her mind. You decided to hang yourself from it instead? I said.