Top 100 Miriam Toews Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

8. “Mom, she says, I dreamt that you had died, and in my dream I said, But if you are dead then there is nobody to catch me if I fall. And then in my dream you came back from death, you were tired, your feet hurt, but you were happy to come back one last time, and you said: Then don’t fall.”

— Miriam Toews

9. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

17. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

20. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

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

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

43. “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

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

— Miriam Toews

45. “The truth is, I don’t have a catchy method of conversing and yet unfortunately suffer of a minute to minute basis the agony of the unexpressed thought.”

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews