“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
Miriam Toews
Born place: in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada
Born date January 1, 1964
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“He pauses. “Maybe that letter was left for you.”
“No, she was pretty pissed that I wrote back.”
Now he hesitates. “I don’t mean that she left the letter for you.”
It takes me a second to figure out his tone. “Rev, if you start preaching at me, I’m going in the house.”
“I’m not preaching.”
No, he’s not. Yet.
He still has that old Bible I found him clutching in my closet. It was his mother’s. He’s read it about twenty times. He’ll debate theology with anyone who’s interested—and I’m not on that list. Geoff and Kristin used to take him to church, but he said he didn’t like that he couldn’t live by his own interpretation.
What he didn’t say was that looking up at a man in a pulpit reminded him too much of his father.
Rev doesn’t walk around quoting Bible verses or anything—usually—but his faith is rock solid. I once asked him how he can believe in a providential god when he barely survived living with his father.
He looked at me and said, “Because I did survive.”
And there’s no arguing that.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Alkimist
“It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“Yes, we are corpses. But you are death. Ciri”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
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