Quotes from Irma Voth

“Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas or words that by their definition promised love.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside.

He offered you a what? she yelled.

An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush.

What is it? she said.

Coffee! I yelled.

Irma, can I come and live--

I turned around again and began to run.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say:

Bad shit at home? You guys are running away?

Yeah, I said.

I understand, said, Noehmi.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“We drank our coffee and talked a little bit more about practical things. Natalie came over and asked me if I knew what the trees were called. I said no. She told me they were jacarandas. She said one March two years ago she was feeling suicidal. She had planned to step in front of a bus. Then she looked at the jacaranda tree and changed her mind.
You decided to hang yourself from it instead? I said.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.
Because I would start to love them, he said.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“The director said he's got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“I said. I’m a maid. I’m a dancer, she said. She stuck her elbows out and snapped her fingers. Well, I said. I get paid. Well, she said. I get applause. Well, I said. I get paid and with that money I rent an apartment and buy food. And a television. Well, she said. I get applause and with that affirmation of my amazing talent I feel happy and confident and cool. Well, I said. Enjoy your life as a dancer. Well, she said. Enjoy your life as a maid. Thanks, I will, I said. Good, she said. We walked in grim silence towards something else.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

“Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson's notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from Irma Voth

About the author

Popular quotes

“I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.”
― Truman Capote, quote from Music for Chameleons

“El amor debe ser como un beso al atardecer..., como el último beso, el auténtico, el verdadero, al término de las historias románticas de la colección Arlequín... ¡El amor debe ser como un aroma de rosas a la hr del crepúsculo!”
― Stephen King, quote from Cycle of the Werewolf

“Call him Judas if you want
but he did it for reasons
much older than silver.”
― Toby Barlow, quote from Sharp Teeth

“Lying flat, the small mound of their child nearly disappeared,with only a palm-sized hardness palpable below her navel. Darcy murmured nonsense over this evidence of their love, tickling Lizzy's skin so that she giggled and squirmed.

"What are you saying to him, love?"

"I am informing him that he has been gifted to the very best mother in the entire world. Also, I am reintroducing myself and thanking him for finally allowing me to feel him. If need be, I shall squeeze him several times a day. He can kick me whenever the whim takes him!" He glanced up into her mirth-filled face.”
― Sharon Lathan, quote from Loving Mr. Darcy: Journeys Beyond Pemberley

“Each time she applied her lip gloss, she imagined another fleet of brain cells dying a horrible death.”
― Michael Buckley, quote from Tales From the Hood

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.