Top 100 Miriam Toews Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.”

— Miriam Toews

2. “But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.”

— Miriam Toews

3. “There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.”

— Miriam Toews

4. “Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.”

— Miriam Toews

5. “Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.”

— Miriam Toews

6. “Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound?”

— Miriam Toews

7. “Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”

— Miriam Toews

8. “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

9. “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

10. “But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.”

— Miriam Toews

11. “It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

— Miriam Toews

12. “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

13. “Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.”

— Miriam Toews

14. “By leaving, we are not necessarily disobeying the men according to the Bible, because we, the women, do not know exactly what is in the Bible, being unable to read it. Furthermore, the only reason why we feel we need to submit to our husbands is because our husbands have told us that the Bible decrees it.”

— Miriam Toews

15. “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

16. “Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.”

— Miriam Toews

17. “All we women have are our dreams – so of course we are dreamers.”

— Miriam Toews

18. “We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”

— Miriam Toews

19. “If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.”

— Miriam Toews

20. “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

21. “Remember what mom used to say? “Shred the guilt.”

— Miriam Toews

22. “When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia.”

— Miriam Toews

23. “The pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself.”

— Miriam Toews

24. “No, Ernie, says Agata, there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.”

— Miriam Toews

25. “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

26. “That’s me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she’d always been able to see but she told me she’d never adjusted to the light, she’d just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn’t taken. Reality was a rusty leg trap.”

— Miriam Toews

27. “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

28. “It’s raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.”

— Miriam Toews

29. “Yoli, she said, I’m just saying that apologies aren’t the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I said. I agree. But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.”

— Miriam Toews

30. “Most of us, she said, absolve ourselves of responsibility for change by sentimentalizing our pasts.”

— Miriam Toews

31. “That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.”

— Miriam Toews

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Cornelius, one of my students, wrote a poem called “The Washline” in which he described the sheets and garments on his mother’s washline as having voices, of speaking with one another, of sending messages to other garments on other washlines.”

— Miriam Toews

35. “Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.”

— Miriam Toews

36. “None of us have ever asked the men for anything, Agata states. Not a single thing, not even for the salt to be passed, not even for a penny or a moment alone or to take the washing in or to open a curtain or to go easy on the small yearlings or to put your hand on the small of my back as I try, again, for the twelfth or thirteenth time, to push a baby out of my body.”

— Miriam Toews

37. “Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?”

— Miriam Toews

38. “Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.”

— Miriam Toews

39. “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

40. “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

41. “My dad had said don’t look, but I’d already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil’s snack.”

— Miriam Toews

42. “When I put the poncho on to show Elf she said farewell to arms.”

— Miriam Toews

43. “My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.”

— Miriam Toews

44. “There must be satisfaction gained in accurately naming the thing that torments you.”

— Miriam Toews

45. “She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, saga eventually – because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either – and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as panful or even more painful than the grief itself.”

— Miriam Toews

46. “Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.”

— Miriam Toews

47. “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

48. “Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It’s the same for thinking, writing, and life.”

— Miriam Toews

49. “Books are what save us. Books are what don’t save us.”

— Miriam Toews

50. “Surely, she says, encouraging others to lie on our behalves must be a worse sin than lying ourselves.”

— Miriam Toews