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Author: Miriam Toews
Quotes of Author: Miriam Toews
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  1. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    Ona protests, quietly, that she doesn't believe that at all. She doesn't believe in authority, period, because authority makes people cruel. Salome interrupts: The people with authority or the people without?
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  2. Miriam Toews _ All My Puny Sorrows

    I googled 'suicide gene' but cancelled the search at the last second. I didn't want to know. Plus, I already knew. People ask: but how does this happen? To think that even with all the security measures we employ these days to keep things out - fences and motion detectors and cameras and sunscreen and vitamins and deadbolts and chains and bike helmets and spinning classes and guards and gates - we can have secret killers lurking inside us? That we can turn on our happy selves the way tumours invade healthy, wholesome organs, the way 'normal' moms suddenly throw their infants off the balcony is...who wants to think about that shit?
    book-quotesuicidedying

  3. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    Salome interrupts. We're not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy {translator's note: Salome didn't use the word "patriarchy" - I inserted it in the place of Salome's curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as "talking through the flowers"}, where the women live our their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche. We are commodities.
    book-quotewomenreligion

  4. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

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

  5. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    I find it curious that she hasn't been excommunicated. Are her small acts of rebellion a convenient outlet for Peters, a type of performance that satisfies the colonists' need to assert themselves, and that allows Peters to act with impunity on a larger scale?
    book-quotereligion

  6. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    Surely, she says, encouraging others to lie on our behalves must be a worse sin than lying ourselves.
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  7. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    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.
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  8. Miriam Toews _ Irma Voth

    I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me.
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  9. Miriam Toews _ All My Puny Sorrows

    Listen, I said, I don't think you understand. I don't want to be presumptuous, but really how could you understand what another person's suicide means? My friend asked the waitress for more coffee. I said that actually, now, I'd begun to measure a person's character and integrity by their ability to kill themselves.
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  10. Miriam Toews _ Women Talking

    The truth is, I don't have a catchy method of conversing and yet unfortunately suffer of a minute to minute basis the agony of the unexpressed thought.
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  11. Miriam Toews _ All My Puny Sorrows

    But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.
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  12. Miriam Toews _ A Complicated Kindness

    When she looked at me she saw a child surrounded by flames, screaming. And that must have been hard for her.
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