Fight Night Quotes

“He looked sad and happy at the same time. That's a popular adult look. Because adults are busy and have to do everything at once, even feel things.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“[W]hat makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing—which is that life goes on.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“She says Mom does the emotional work for the whole family, feeling everything ten times harder than is necessary so the rest of us can act normal.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“I have videos of Grandma on my cellphone. In one I asked her what will happen to her body after she dies. She says ahhhhh, my body! My body will become energy that will light your path.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“You’ll know for yourself what to fight. Grandma told me fighting can be making peace. She said sometimes we move forward by looking back and sometimes the onward can be knowing when to stop.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“If you lose your mind can you find your mind again? Of course you can. That's life!”
― Miriam Toews , Fight Night

“They stole it from us. It was. . .our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need. . .not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative. . .to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“You're a small thing and you must learn to fight.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Lonely fights are the worst, she said. She’d rather lose a lonely fight. She’d rather join a losing team than win a lonely fight.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“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.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“She said what makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing- which is that life goes on.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“On the days she gets the death calls she grabs at me when I walk past her and I know she wants affection, but I hate always having to be the embodiment of life.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Grandma asked me if I wanted to continue our Editorial Meeting but I didn’t answer. Then she asked me if I knew what bioluminescence was. I smashed breadcrumbs with my thumb and kept my piehole shut. It’s one’s ability to create light from within, said Grandma. Like a firefly. I think you have that, Swivchen. You have a fire inside you and your job is to not let it go out. I’m too young to have a job, I said.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Even when Grandma is fast asleep and snoring, if I put one finger gently on her shoulder she’ll burst to life and stretch her arms out to me and smile and say, Sweetheartchen! I ask her every time, Did you detect my presence? But she never hears me because she takes her hearing aids out to sleep and she just laughs and holds on to my wrists like they’re reins on a horse. She can’t believe she keeps waking up alive and is really amazed and grateful about it which is what all the pamphlets at therapy say we’re supposed to be feeling about every new day.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“She sprays cops when they have their windows down and are cruising slowly past our house because she hates them after what they did when Grandpa died, and just period. When they get out of the car and walk up to her she says things like, Here comes Rocket Man! Send in the clowns! The cops smile because they think she’s just a crazy old lady. But she really means business. She hates them. She doesn’t want to hate anybody but she can’t help it and she isn’t even going to pray about it because she thinks God secretly hates them too.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“I’d made “Fever” Mom’s ring tone because the song was about getting the flu from being too close to someone. I thought it was a good choice because she holds me tight and kisses me all the time and she’s always blowing her nose on me and it makes me sick and gives me fever—but now I wasn’t sure it was the right ring tone after all. I didn’t want to have a sexy ring tone for Mom on my cellphone!”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Grandma said there are no winners or losers when it comes to bladder control.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“She wrote words in quotation marks that said, “It is important to fail at mothering or else your child will not pass from illusion to reality: the mother teaches the child to handle frustration by being one.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Yes, the world was … however it wanted to be. One way or the other, it wasn’t to be counted upon. It pleased itself. Not much point in having special wishes, as far as the world went, that was clear. So long as one could be alive, take part in it. And that’s what he was doing.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Are you kidding me? It’s only pain. We don’t worry about pain. It’s not life-threatening. It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most who will conquer,”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Let’s say goodbye now and get it over with! We’re friends, we love each other, we know it, we’ve had good times, and one day we’ll be dead, whether we’re assisted or not. So, goodbye!”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“This can be today’s math class, said Grandma. If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death?”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Then Grandma shouted, Good luck! Have fun! Don’t work too hard! She says that every single time a person leaves. She says that where she’s from it’s the most subversive thing you can say because they didn’t believe in luck and fun was a sin and work was the only thing you were supposed to”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“everything. Grandma told me she doesn’t know how Mom was able to stop ranting long enough to get pregnant with Gord. She compared impregnating Mom to creeping up to the edge of an”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Grandma skips over pertinent details because she’s got five minutes left to live and doesn’t want to waste it on the small picture.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“fragments are the only truth. Fragments of what? I asked her. Exactly! she said.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“Today marks the beginning of our neo-realist period, Grandma told me this morning.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“This can be today’s math class”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night

“It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most who will conquer, she said.”
― Miriam Toews, Fight Night