154 Quotes by Miriam Toews

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.

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.

She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, saga eventually – because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either – and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as panful or even more painful than the grief itself.

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.

Yoli, she said, I’m just saying that apologies aren’t the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I said. I agree. But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.

Cornelius, one of my students, wrote a poem called “The Washline” in which he described the sheets and garments on his mother’s washline as having voices, of speaking with one another, of sending messages to other garments on other washlines.

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!

No, no, said the librarian, forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it.

Perhaps all of us are crazy, Ona says. Of course we’re all crazy, says Mejal. How can we not be?