Quotes from Miriam Toews

Em recorda el que va dir Montaigne: «No hi ha res que es cregui amb tanta fermesa com el que es coneix menys».

Els coneixements tenen fluïdesa, canvien, els fets canvien, es converteixen en no fets.

Ona's laughter is the finest, the most exquisite sound in all of nature, filled with breath and promise, and the only sound she releases into the world that she doesn't also try to retrieve.

Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging onto the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them.

We don't always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

All we women have are our dreams—so of course we are dreamers.

Greta has many times announced that she is no longer a Mennonite -- and yet was born from Mennonites and continues to live as a Mennonite, with Mennonites, in a Mennonite colony, where she speaks the Mennonite language. Those things do not make me a Mennonite, Greta argues... [I] don't know where to go.

In the very early morning light I saw Nora and my mother sleeping, finally, on their sides and face to face, holding hands, all four hands entwined like a skein of wool, like a mating ball of garter snakes, so that whatever was inside them would be very well protected.

I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas or words that by their definition promised love.

Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson. Because I would start to love them, he said.

Salome volvió a reír. No me había dado cuenta de lo mucho que ríe, como su madre, como todas las mujeres. Ahorran saliva para reír.

several of the people we love are people we also fear.

Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book

W]e must leave in order to achieve distance... a new perspective that is rational, understanding, AND loving and obedient, and in keeping with our faith... It is our duty to leave. Not fighting, but moving on.

Nos sentiremos angustiadas y apenadas, y sentiremos incertidumbre, y tristeza, pero no culpabilidad, dice Agata. Mariche corrige: Puede que nos sintamos culpables, pero sabremos que no lo somos Podríamos tener sentimientos homicidas, pero sabremos que no somos asesinas. Podríamos sentir sed de venganza, pero sabremos que no somos mapaches. Podríamos sentirnos perdidas, pero sabremos que no somos unas perdidas.

I sat on my Dad's bed and flipped through the page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black and white photo which if it where used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful

I look at the boys, asleep, unconscious to be exact, and plead silently with them to tell me the truth.

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.

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

True love, I said. And yet I'm sticking around unreasonably and knowing it's impossible because who knows? I want to find out. I live hopefully.

Perhaps not men, per se, but a pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of men's hearts and minds.

I feel that so many problems in my life may have been prevented had I been more contained.

So much of what exists in the outside world is kept out of Molotschna, but curses, like pain, always find a way in.

And when the perpetrators return, the women of Molotschna will be given the opportunity to forgive these men, thus guaranteeing everyone's place in heaven. If the women don't forgive the men, says Peters, the women will have to leave the colony for the outside world, of which they know nothing. The women have very little time. Only two days, to organise their response.