Top 100 Miriam Toews Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “No, no, said the librarian, forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it.”

— Miriam Toews

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

— Miriam Toews

55. “If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.”

— Miriam Toews

56. “Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.”

— Miriam Toews

57. “In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We’d been through all of this before. We loved each other. We fought for each other. When worlds collapsed we were buried in the rubble together and when we were dug out of the rubble and rescued we all celebrated together.”

— Miriam Toews

58. “Sadness is what holds our bones in place.”

— Miriam Toews

59. “I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn’t mean you stop telling the story.”

— Miriam Toews

60. “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

61. “True love, I said. And yet I’m sticking around unreasonably and knowing it’s impossible because who knows? I want to find out. I live hopefully.”

— Miriam Toews

62. “Nic loves Elf’s odd requests, each one is like a holiday for him... and he’s not a Mennonite, which is important – in a man – for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame.”

— Miriam Toews

63. “I find it curious that she hasn’t been excommunicated. Are her small acts of rebellion a convenient outlet for Peters, a type of performance that satisfies the colonists’ need to assert themselves, and that allows Peters to act with impunity on a larger scale?”

— Miriam Toews

64. “She is not crying, she says, she is moisturizing.”

— Miriam Toews

65. “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

66. “Perhaps all of us are crazy, Ona says. Of course we’re all crazy, says Mejal. How can we not be?”

— Miriam Toews

67. “We stopped talking for a long, long time. A long time. Nurses came and went attaching and detaching things. Hundreds of thousands of babies were born while we weren’t talking. The continents continued to separate at the same page as fingernails growing.”

— Miriam Toews

68. “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

69. “Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place.”

— Miriam Toews

70. “Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.”

— Miriam Toews

71. “She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named – when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.”

— Miriam Toews

72. “I don’t know now why I let her believe otherwise, but someday, perhaps, it will be clear.”

— Miriam Toews

73. “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

74. “What sorts of things do you google when your favorite person in the world is determined to leave it?”

— Miriam Toews

75. “Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?”

— Miriam Toews

76. “She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named – when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery?”

— Miriam Toews

77. “We do not have to be forgiven by the men of God, she shouts, for protecting our children from the depraved actions of vicious men who are often the very same men we are meant to ask for forgiveness.”

— Miriam Toews

78. “We are women without a voice, Ona states calmly. We are women out of time and place, without even the language of the country we reside in. We are Mennonites without a homeland. We have nothing to return to, and even the animals of Molotschna are safer in their homes than we women are. All we women have are our dreams – so of course we are dreamers.”

— Miriam Toews

79. “Isn’t it interesting, she says, that the one and only request the women would make of the men would be to leave?”

— Miriam Toews

80. “How should we know what they’re guilty of or not? says Mariche. But we do know, says Ona. We do know that the conditions of Molotschna have been created by man, that these attacks have been made possible, even the conception of these acts, the planning of these attacks, the rationale for these attacks within the minds of the men, because of the circumstances of Molotschna. And those circumstances have been created and ordained by the men, by the elders and by Peters.”

— Miriam Toews

81. “I grappled with the idea of explaining hemispheres to her, how we are required to share the sun with other parts of the world, that if one were to observe the earth from outer space one could see as many as fifteen sunsets and sunrises in a day – and that perhaps by sharing the sun the world could learn to share everything, learn that everything belonged to everyone!”

— Miriam Toews

82. “The women in the loft have taught me that consciousness is resistance, that faith is action, that time is running out. But can faith also be to return, to stay, to serve?”

— Miriam Toews

83. “Perhaps not men, per se, but a pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of men’s hearts and minds.”

— Miriam Toews

84. “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

85. “In the very early morning light I saw Nora and my mother sleeping, finally, on their sides and face to face, holding hands, all four hands entwined like a skein of wool, like a mating ball of garter snakes, so that whatever was inside them would be very well protected.”

— Miriam Toews

86. “She once explained to me that, as a Molotschnan, she had everything she wanted; all she had to do was convince herself that she wanted very little.”

— Miriam Toews

87. “We will feel anguish and we will feel sorrow and we will feel uncertainty and we will feel sadness, but not guilt, says Agata. Mariche amends: We may feel guilty but we will know we are not guilty.”

— Miriam Toews

88. “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

89. “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

90. “En aquest seu afany de poder, en necessitaven d’altres sobre qui exercir aquest poder, i aquests altres som nosaltres.”

— Miriam Toews

91. “Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals, and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals. But not all men, says Mejal. Ona clarifies: Perhaps not men, per se, but a pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of men’s hearts and minds.”

— Miriam Toews

92. “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

93. “If God is a loving God He will forgive us Himself. If God is a vengeful God then He has created us in His Image.”

— Miriam Toews

94. “If you lose your mind can you find your mind again? Of course you can. That’s life!”

— Miriam Toews

95. “Men and women will make all decisions for the colony collectively. Women will be allowed to think. Girls will be taught to read and write. The schoolhouse must display a map of the world so that we can begin to understand our place in it. A new religion, extrapolated from the old but focused on love, will be created by the women of Molotschna.”

— Miriam Toews

96. “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

97. “I feel safe in the car, alone and protected. I can see people milling about in the parking lot but they can’t see me. Well, they can but they think I’m insane so they look away which is the same as being invisible.”

— Miriam Toews

98. “I stare out of the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one’s imagination and one’s goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving. In life as in writing as in any type of creation that sets off to be a success, knowable and inspiring.”

— Miriam Toews

99. “I look at the boys, asleep, unconscious to be exact, and plead silently with them to tell me the truth.”

— Miriam Toews

100. “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?”

— Miriam Toews