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8482bca
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I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds.
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Miriam Toews |
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f5a3442
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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9cf3800
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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469b021
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Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?
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Miriam Toews |
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fd330ed
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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.
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sad
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Miriam Toews |
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da2d402
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You put the fist in pacifist?
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Miriam Toews |
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027dc5f
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The guy's name was Colt. Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse? I guess, said the guy, or a gun. Well, which do you prefer? she said. What do you mean? he asked. Like, how do you prefer to think of yourself? As a baby, male horse? No, he said, he didn't really like to think of himself that way. Well, then, as a gun? she said. No, not really, he said. He preferred basically not to think of himself at all.
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Miriam Toews |
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8cf009f
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it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and..
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Miriam Toews |
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0950da8
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In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We'd been through all of this before. We loved each other. We fought for each other. When worlds collapsed we were buried in the rubble together and when we were dug out of the rubble and rescued we all celebrated together.
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Miriam Toews |
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39e2d54
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to survive something we first need to know what it is we are surviving
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Miriam Toews |
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8a23a2f
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Books are what save us. Books are what don't save us.
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Miriam Toews |
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0fcdfd3
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And what have you been up to? she asked. Oh, I don't know really, I said. Not much. Learning how to be a good loser.
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life
losers
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Miriam Toews |
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64e6bfc
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They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn't say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault?
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Miriam Toews |
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bddc377
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What you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behaviour on the street. You can't go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them evil when they destroy themselves. You will never walk down a street and feel a lightness come over you. You will never fly.
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Miriam Toews |
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b896fee
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Remember what mom used to say? "Shred the guilt."
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Miriam Toews |
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629af07
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That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.
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Miriam Toews |
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8e243d7
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I learned another thing, which is that 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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f6d1816
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I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what's that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that's from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn't dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things ..
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Miriam Toews |
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cef1483
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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..
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Miriam Toews |
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79199e5
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Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It's the same for thinking, writing, and life.
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Miriam Toews |
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ae50438
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Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound?
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Miriam Toews |
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35601b2
|
Maybe she was enjoying a moment in her life, a sliver of light, a flash memory of one of her kids, something sweet and approaching reality.
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Miriam Toews |
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6154787
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Let's not have forced gaiety this Christmas, said Nora, like it was a dish. We'll have a tiny bit of it, I said.
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humor
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Miriam Toews |
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6311c5a
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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..
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Miriam Toews |
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7995bdc
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I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word.
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Miriam Toews |
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db50079
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Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.
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Miriam Toews |
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270c760
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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 dec..
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literature
life
irma-voth
miriam-toews
feeling
novel
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Miriam Toews |
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26195a8
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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 wen..
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Miriam Toews |
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ff3c80d
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Alcohol, sadness, impulsive, regrettable behavior. Those were his reasons. The staples of discord. I understood. Sometimes he sends me e-mails that are so formal they seem to have been drafted by a phalanx of lawyers and sometimes he sends me e-mails that are sort of a continuation of our conversations over the years, a kind of intimate banter about nothing as though this whole divorce thing is just a game. All the recriminations and apolog..
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Miriam Toews |
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aa8508e
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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97f45fb
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I told her [...] that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that she could control her life, that I understood that pain is sometimes psychic, not only physical, that she wanted nothing more than to end it and to sleep forever, that for her life was over but that for me it was still ongoing and that an aspect of it was trying to save her, that the notion of saving her was one that we didn't agree on, that I was willing to d..
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Miriam Toews |
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706f9f4
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By leaving, we are not necessarily disobeying the men according to the Bible, because we, the women, do not know exactly what is in the Bible, being unable to read it. Furthermore, the only reason why we feel we need to submit to our husbands is because our husbands have told us that the Bible decrees it.
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feminism
women
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Miriam Toews |
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f030f51
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suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.
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Miriam Toews |
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cfb8be9
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the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty.
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women-talking
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Miriam Toews |
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4100760
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Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little..
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Miriam Toews |
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5ca085d
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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.
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Miriam Toews |
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5d5315e
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You always say oh, that's so unprofessional as though there's some definition of professional that's also a moral imperative for how to behave.
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Miriam Toews |
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2503fdf
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My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.
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Miriam Toews |
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8308054
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Yolandi, the central character in the book "All My Puny Sorrows" says that "the core of the argument for it [assisted suicide] is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering" (p. 222)."
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Miriam Toews |
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1d40ab1
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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 aro..
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literature
fiction
funny
inspirational
novel
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Miriam Toews |
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87eeb55
|
When we got back to the house Logan grabbed his basketball, threw it really hard against the hallway wall, knocked the framed family photo to the floor-it didn't break, he didn't pick it up-and left with a couple of his friends. Thebes picked up the photo, hung it back on the wall, sighed heavily like she'd travelled to every corner of the world, on her knees, with a knife in her back and a boa constrictor wrapped around her chest, and then..
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Miriam Toews |
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011055e
|
Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all.I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room... Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids.
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Miriam Toews |
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eb1842e
|
We were making good time now, barrelling through the bodacious curves of southeastern Utah and ignoring all impending signs of trouble with the van. At least I was. "You guys happy?" I said. The kids smiled at me like I was a dog chasing my tail, sweet but stupid, and looked away."
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Miriam Toews |
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81ff787
|
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.
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Miriam Toews |