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628272d
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Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
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questions
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Miriam Toews |
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39415fc
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Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
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Miriam Toews |
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81c45ce
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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0cb57a9
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Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?
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Miriam Toews |
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68b80d2
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just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.
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Miriam Toews |
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4a3ed4c
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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 with that, gentlemen.
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Miriam Toews |
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09f6e99
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Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.
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Miriam Toews |
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9bb55be
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Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote "If you love someone, set them free" he can't have been directing his advice at human beings."
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Miriam Toews |
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10dfa6d
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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851608a
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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?"
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robert-plant
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Miriam Toews |
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ff3275d
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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2055790
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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381cba6
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Sadness is what holds our bones in place.
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Miriam Toews |
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7687b54
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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 exhauste..
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Miriam Toews |
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1a70010
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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38e8ee8
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Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.
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Miriam Toews |
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2fb2efc
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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.
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conversing
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Miriam Toews |
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4a2806a
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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 facia..
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Miriam Toews |
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8b85f16
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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
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Miriam Toews |
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749bd4e
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And then I thought that people like to talk about their pain and loneliness but in disguised ways. Or in ways that are sort of organized but not really. I realized that when I try to start conversations with people, just strangers on the street or in the grocery store, they think I'm exposing my pain or loneliness in the wrong way and they get nervous. But then I saw the impromptu choir repeating the line about everyone having holes in thei..
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Miriam Toews |
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61ea77d
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If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
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Miriam Toews |
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a51961d
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Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.
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Miriam Toews |
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ff371a8
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Apparently she got stranded out at sea again this time. It happens to her every time she goes to an ocean. She just bobs along on her back enjoying the sun and the undulating waves and then gets too far out and can't get back and has to be rescued. She doesn't panic at all, just sort of slowly drifts away from shore and waits to be noticed or missed. Her big thing is going out beyond the wake where it's calm and she can bob in the moonlight..
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Miriam Toews |
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808e8e8
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Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place.
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survival
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Miriam Toews |
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2996ab6
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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b706f2a
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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8942ed3
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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85a9edf
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If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.
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Miriam Toews |
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51c12f4
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Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.
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laughter
worship
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Miriam Toews |
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6b057fa
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There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
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Miriam Toews |
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17f76a5
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When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.
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Miriam Toews |
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7496815
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It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
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Miriam Toews |
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2d8285b
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But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
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grief
love
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Miriam Toews |
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9b6e842
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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bba6028
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And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.
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Miriam Toews |
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b19148b
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Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.
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Miriam Toews |
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844e508
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Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?
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Miriam Toews |
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1ec1a89
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We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that..
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guilt
nostalgia
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Miriam Toews |
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c4ade33
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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 goo..
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Miriam Toews |
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a7cde82
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She was a strange, unsettled planet that had had once sustained life. She was a language that I had thought I almost understood even though I couldn't speak it. She hadn't always been this way. She used to wear high knee socks and short shorts and tube tops, and travel everywhere on roller skates.
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Miriam Toews |
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2747c59
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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9a450c9
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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
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Miriam Toews |
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143d022
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My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!
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Miriam Toews |
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b52aeaf
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She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named--when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human."
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Miriam Toews |