Miriam Toews Quotations

With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.

Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.

When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.

There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.

Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.

My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'

I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit.

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in Heaven and Hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to Heaven.

'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.

I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.

We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.

When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.

You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.

At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.

'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.

I stare out 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.

I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinics where assisted suicide or euthanasia is practiced, they call it 'weariness of life.'

The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.

The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me.

A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back.

The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.

The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.

I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides.

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

We Poor Cousins don’t care at all though, except for when we’re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy cool high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition or purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. 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.

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

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

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

...and I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.

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.

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

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .

She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself

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.

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

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

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.

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.

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

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

It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.

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.

Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word.

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.

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

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

A lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.

All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment.