154 Quotes by Miriam Toews

Greta has many times announced that she is no longer a Mennonite -- and yet was born from Mennonites and continues to live as a Mennonite, with Mennonites, in a Mennonite colony, where she speaks the Mennonite language. Those things do not make me a Mennonite, Greta argues... [I] don't know where to go.

All we women have are our dreams – so of course we are dreamers.

We are not members, . . . we are commodities. . . . When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters.

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.

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.

...after hearing my mom's survival dream I think maybe this is my survival dream and it's not a nightmare. It's the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we're surviving.

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.

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.

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