Toews Quotes & Sayings

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter. — Miriam Toews

It was the first time in my life that I had been aware of my own existence. It was the first time in my life I had realized that I was alive. And if I was alive, then I could die, and I mean forever. Forever dead. Not heaven, not eternal life on some other plane ... just darkness, curtain, scene. Permanently. And that was the key to my new religion, I figured. That's why life was so fucking great. I want that day back. I want to be nine again and be told, 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. — Miriam Toews

I think whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to be a hockey player, that's where it all started, watching the Winnipeg Jets play as a young kid. — Jonathan Toews

You still have to eat. — Miriam Toews

The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through 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 were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful. — Miriam Toews

For a few seconds I thought about my little brothers who loved connecting things with rope. I wondered if I'd ever see them again and a torpedo of sadness struck me and moved straight trough my body. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ... — Miriam Toews

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

And I finally understand what she needs to hear and that she's talking about not just me but Elf too and I tell her that my sorrow was not created by her, that my childhood was a joyful thing, an island in the sun, that her mothering is impeccable, that she is not to blame. — Miriam Toews

The director said he's got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions. — Miriam Toews

All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment. — Miriam Toews

I love Chicago. Chicago is my home. — Jonathan 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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

We don't choose the books we write; they choose us. — Miriam Toews

I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer. — Miriam Toews

I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

Apparently she got stranded out at sea again this time. It happens to her every time she goes to an ocean. She just bobs along on her back enjoying the sun and the undulating waves and then gets too far out and can't get back and has to be rescued. She doesn't panic at all, just sort of slowly drifts away from shore and waits to be noticed or missed. Her big thing is going out beyond the wake where it's calm and she can bob in the moonlight far out at sea. That's her biggest pleasure. Our family is trying to escape everything all at once, even gravity, even the shoreline. We don't even know what we're running away from. Maybe we're just restless people. Maybe we're adventurers. Maybe we're terrified. Maybe we're crazy. Maybe Planet Earth is not our real home. — Miriam Toews

Keep the bars open-we're coming home. — Jonathan Toews

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). — Miriam Toews

A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you — Miriam Toews

Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood. — Miriam Toews

Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don't apply to them when they're on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn. — Miriam Toews

Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

My father died beside trees on iron rails ... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.' — Miriam Toews

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages. — Miriam Toews

But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief. — Miriam Toews

The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinics where assisted suicide or euthanasia is practiced, they call it 'weariness of life.' — Miriam Toews

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

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. — Miriam Toews

It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God's will. It's hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have emptiness. — Miriam Toews

You put the fist in pacifist? — Miriam Toews

Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

... just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story. — Miriam Toews

Where are they going to get a camera? I asked. I don't know, said Noehmi. They'll probably get sidetracked along the way. Or they'll come back with paint instead, or beer, or some new idea for a circus or something. They're social anarchists. — Miriam Toews

Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all.I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room ... Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids. — Miriam Toews

Alcohol, sadness, impulsive, regrettable behavior. Those were his reasons. The staples of discord. I understood. Sometimes he sends me e-mails that are so formal they seem to have been drafted by a phalanx of lawyers and sometimes he sends me e-mails that are sort of a continuation of our conversations over the years, a kind of intimate banter about nothing as though this whole divorce thing is just a game. All the recriminations and apologies and attempts at understanding and attacks ... I was guilty of these things too. Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. — Miriam Toews

There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication. — Miriam Toews

Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside.
He offered you a what? she yelled.
An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush.
What is it? she said.
Coffee! I yelled.
Irma, can I come and live
I turned around again and began to run. — Miriam Toews

After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hangs. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together. — Miriam Toews

But there is a kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don't know what to say. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context. — Miriam Toews

There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in Heaven and Hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to Heaven. — Miriam Toews

I probably spend the most time with Toews: we have the same schedule, and we're roomies on the road; we sit next to each other. We do a lot of promotions together. — Patrick Kane

I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me. — Miriam Toews

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

With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery. — Miriam Toews

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

I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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! — Miriam Toews

Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones? — Miriam Toews

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing. — Miriam Toews

It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. The way it does. But it exhausted me, like a seizure. — Miriam Toews

During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that's created from decay. — Miriam Toews

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

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. — Miriam Toews

He says it's a condition of our relationship that I don't smoke, she says. We laugh. We are tired. Too tired to confront conditions. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say:
Bad shit at home? You guys are running away?
Yeah, I said.
I understand, said, Noehmi. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

The day before the day before my father killed himself he took my hand in his and said Yoli, it feels to me as though the lights are going out. We were sitting by a fountain in a park at soon. — Miriam Toews

Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life? — Miriam Toews

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? — Miriam Toews

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page! — Miriam Toews

He would be admitting to himself that life has suddenly become very short, very precious, that soon he'll no longer exist, that it'll be over. Of course he knew that, we know that, we say it, but to really, really know it, to be certain of it, is more than he can be right now. His bed is safe. Sleep is easy. He's not a stupid man. — Miriam Toews

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

My dad started taking me to Winnipeg games when I was 3 or 4. As a kid, I loved Wayne Gretzky, and I remember the first game I got to see him play against the Jets. The Kings beat the Jets, and I was happy that they did. Gretzky left the game after the first period, and I was upset about that. — Jonathan Toews

When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words. — Miriam Toews

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and 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. And in a way that's kind of relaxing. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity. — Miriam Toews

Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life. — Miriam Toews

The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cementery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together. — Miriam Toews

Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. 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 on to 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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies. — Miriam Toews

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences. — Miriam Toews

The Harder you work, the easier it looks — Jonathan Toews

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews

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. — Miriam Toews