A Truce That Is Not Peace Quotes

“Transformed into nothing, he cannot be affected: he lacks lack. The apocalypse has already occurred, and he survives without hope.” —Juan Villoro”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“thing. If we can’t salvage the bits of memory and matter that have made us what we are, let us at least acknowledge the whirlwind.” —Christian Wiman”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“what Freud called ‘normal unhappiness,’ wherein we might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.” —Christian Wiman”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“She taught me how to stay alive. Silence and words: both are good, both are failures, both are efforts, and in that effort is where life lies—not lies, or maybe it does—but where it exists.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“We’re going home. We’re hoping to make it. We’re writing, we’re bailing, we’re flailing, we’re sucking air, hollering into the wind, help, we’re sinking. We’re writing. We’re bailing. We’re silent, we’ve made a decision. We’re content. We’re sitting calmly in the prow of the little boat that is definitely taking on more water now, more than before. We are not bailing. We’re trying to go home. We’re all trying to get home.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“love you. Love is very important—it’s the only comfort. I wish I could take your sadness away. I’ll call you this evening.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“We’re so cold and hungry now that we don’t really have the strength to fight a lot. That might be one of the keys to a good relationship.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Afterwards Wolfie said we had some soul-searching to do, and I was like, Do you think you’ll find one?”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Remember when Grace’s kid asked Mom, When you’re dead is it forever? And Mom said, You get the picture, boy.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“I just felt very calm for the first time in a long time, hearing this song. And normal. And happy and sort of excited about the future. It’s hard to describe. I felt like I was nothing—not an artist or a cool girlfriend or a revolutionary or whatever. I was just nothing. It felt so good. Like a fresh start. Or, not even a start to anything. Anyway, I know I’m not making sense.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“speaking of parts, of body parts: in my original language, in my mother’s mother tongue, which is an unwritten language that is dying in the world and that was never very much alive in the first place, the only word they use for “vagina” and “uterus” and “cervix” or “vulva” or “labia” or any of those female parts, is “da mutter,” which means “the mother.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Most of my time in Winnipeg was spent taking care of my granddaughters and also my mother, who needed help with just about everything, even showering, which was a pretty funny adventure for us both.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Is silence the disciplined alternative to writing?”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing and lost nothing.” —Yiyun Li”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“When one does not have to account for one’s own existence in it, however, the world offers abundant joy.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Literature is not compassion; it’s war.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“After my father killed himself, my mother stopped opening her mail, moved to an apartment in the city a few houses away from mine, and began to memorize three-letter words. I photocopied hundreds and hundreds of pages of three-letter words for her to memorize, and she kept these in piles all over her apartment, in every room, on every surface.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of a man.” That’s easy”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“One also serves God by doing nothing; indeed, by doing nothing more than by doing nothing.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“If the reason why I write has removed the reason why I write, is it still reasonable to write?”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“That afternoon my mother read the letter written thirty-five years before by the biological father of my son to my father, and instantly tore it up. “There was no reason for that letter to exist,” she said. “There was nothing edifying about it.” First order of the day. Clean up the blood.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Yes, I told my grandson on another occasion, it’s true. I ate an entire church bulletin one Sunday out of sheer, excruciating boredom. Are you telling him to eat paper? asked my daughter. I’m telling him to beware of organized religion.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“That night? That night he was either going to kill himself or create a new life.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“One remembers one’s first love as one remembers the first casualty of war.” —Pushkin”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“Little G is sculpting cats out of clay, and she asks me if I’m ever afraid.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“I am so confused, angry, sad (overwhelmingly, close to tears fifty times a day), unproductive, vengeful, snide, lonely, LONELY, most of all, so fucking lonely. But what do I do about it? Read, read, read more and more, never go out, stare at my computer, piss off C with what he thinks are terminal neuroses, say yeah yeah yeah to the kids, dream of getting drunk every night, never do.”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace

“The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.” —Anton Chekhov”
― Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace