“Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“...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?”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. The way it does. But it exhausted me, like a seizure.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit out right back out of him and filled the silent part of their lives with books and coffee and other things.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you're going. But there's nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“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, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“And all our righteousnesses are filthy rags and we all do fade as a leaf and our inequities like the wind have taken us away”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, 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.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“When negative experiences such as having one's house shot at occur in my dad's life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life's puzzle fuse into meaning like the continents before that colossal rift. It's entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he's able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus schedule that we've had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.
But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren't happening and he'd be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two and he'd probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and ARRANGE it on there so you'd know it was the centerpiece of his life.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“It was the first time in my life that I had been aware of my own existence. It was the first time in my life I had realized that I was alive. And if I was alive, then I could die, and I mean forever. Forever dead. Not heaven, not eternal life on some other plane…just darkness, curtain, scene. Permanently. And that was the key to my new religion, I figured. That’s why life was so fucking great. I want that day back. I want to be nine again and be told, Nomi: someday you’ll be gone, you’ll be dust, and then even less than dust. Nothing. There’s no other place to be. This world is good enough for you because it has to be. Go ahead and love it.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“My dad had said don’t look, but I’d already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil’s snack.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay he shouted. All right We have to get you a stick We have to get tape I'll be waiting in the car”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don't apply to them when they're on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“I heard Tash say: Nomi, you’re sad man. Get a grip. Walk away. What have I taught you? And I thought: You taught me that some people can leave and some can’t and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those you can’t and I’m one of the ones who can’t because you’re one of the ones who did and there’s this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
Miriam Toews
Born place: in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada
Born date January 1, 1964
See more on GoodReads
“She had perfect features, with her eye, nose, lips, and ears the right size and in right places. That is all it takes to make people beautiful, normal body parts – yet why does nature mess it up so many times?”
― Chetan Bhagat, quote from 2 States: The Story of My Marriage
“I didn’t care about anybody, even myself. And when I did….” Zane’s jaw clenched, and he kept his eyes focused on the window. Anything but on the man sitting across from him. “I let him walk away”
― Abigail Roux, quote from Cut & Run
“Every life has a soundtrack.
There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup.
If you ask me, music is the language of memory.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Sing You Home
“I hope you like cherry coke, baby doll, or we can't be friends.”
― Jamie McGuire, quote from Beautiful Oblivion
“But as we are looking toward our future, I'm not sure it matters what we want to be but rather who we want to be. Someone honest or deceitful? Someone kind or cruel? Someone loyal or unfaithful? In any profession we can elect to be any of those things. I think this assignment is not only about what we choose to do but about who we choose to be. I choose to always be loyal to myself.”
― Ellen Schreiber, quote from Royal Blood
Moral Letters to Luc...
Sword of Destiny
The Annotated Alice
Blood Meridian: Or t...
New Grub StreetBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
