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All Quotes by author - Miriam Toews
" A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back. "
Person
Keep Going
Push
" All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment. "
Moment
Books
Right Moment
" A lot of times, people think that it doesn't make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody. "
Husband
People
Think
" A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer. "
Love
Forget
Good
" At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead. "
Irish
Life
My Life
" A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative. "
You
Experience
Better
" Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality. "
Culture
Powerful
Struggle
" 'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me. "
Girl
Life
Me
" I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit. "
World
Successful
Look
" I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me. "
Tools
Writing
World
" Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page! "
Ignore
Blood
Advice
" I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog. "
Me
Difficult
Dog
" In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences. "
Writing
Free
Raw
" I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides. "
Remember
Parents
Beautiful
" 'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters. "
Book
Time
Characters
" I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies. "
Town
Years
Canadian
" I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving. "
Character
Life
Writing
" I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer. "
Culture
Want
Authority
" Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood. "
Like
Art
Important
" My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.' "
Father
You
Trees
" The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter. "
Big
Real
More
" There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication. "
Kind
People
Like
" There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in Heaven and Hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to Heaven. "
My Life
Myself
Think
" The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place. "
Rock
Think
Waves
" There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine. "
Than
Soul
Age
" The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me. "
Love
Theme
Special
" The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinics where assisted suicide or euthanasia is practiced, they call it 'weariness of life.' "
Debate
Know
Life
" The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse. "
Long
Search
Writing
" This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing. "
Writing
Truth
Me
" We don't choose the books we write; they choose us. "
Us
Choose
Books
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