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

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Popular quotes

“If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider

“And we will cause it to be well-made, this Sacrifice. You, young and never loving; I, old and never loved. Such a Song the Sea will never have seen.”
― Diane Duane, quote from Deep Wizardry

“afternoon and the furniture is all assembled.”
― Elizabeth Chadwick, quote from Lady of the English

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, quote from Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.”
― Peter S. Beagle, quote from Tamsin

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