Miriam Toews > Quotes

“Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.”
― Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

“She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“...and I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.”
― Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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.”
― 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, The Flying Troutmans

“Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, Irma Voth

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?”
― Miriam Toews, Irma Voth

“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.”
― Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

“When negative experiences such as having one's house shot at occur in my dad's life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life's puzzle fuse into meaning like the continents before that colossal rift. It's entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he's able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus schedule that we've had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.


But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren't happening and he'd be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two and he'd probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and ARRANGE it on there so you'd know it was the centerpiece of his life.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, Summer of My Amazing Luck: A Novel

“It seemed like he could never figure out which Trudie he loved the best, the docile church basement lady in the moon boots or the rebellious chick with the sexy lingerie. I imagine that both of those extremes were just poses and that the real Trudie fell somewhere in between. But that’s the thing about this town - there’s no room for in between. You’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. Actually, very good or very bad. Or very good at being very bad without being detected. ”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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 Flying Troutmans

“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, The Flying Troutmans

“When we got back to the house Logan grabbed his basketball, threw it really hard against the hallway wall, knocked the framed family photo to the floor-it didn't break, he didn't pick it up-and left with a couple of his friends. Thebes picked up the photo, hung it back on the wall, sighed heavily like she'd travelled to every corner of the world, on her knees, with a knife in her back and a boa constrictor wrapped around her chest, and then made us a couple of blueberry smoothies.”
― Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

“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, The Flying Troutmans

“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, Swing Low: A Life

“I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay he shouted. All right We have to get you a stick We have to get tape I'll be waiting in the car”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“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, A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

“When I opened up the bottle of wine, Thebes said whoa, you yanked that cork out of there like you were saving it from drowning. She got out her markers and drew a screaming face on the cork.”
― Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

“Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy.”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students.”
― Miriam Toews, Swing Low

“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, The Flying Troutmans

“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, Irma Voth

“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, The Flying Troutmans

“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