Words matter. These are the best Miriam Toews Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
We don’t choose the books we write; they choose us.
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.
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.’
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.
Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I’ve experienced, what I’ve felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don’t want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.
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 It’s the old, outdated garrison mentality.
With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it’s like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
You don’t need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.
At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master’s degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.
‘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.
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.
I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.
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.
I don’t even know what ‘successful’ means. We’re all failures. Look at the world. We’re all complicit.
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.
When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.
All the books I’ve read, I’ve read at the right moment.
There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.
‘Irma Voth’ is my sixth book, but it’s only the third time I’ve featured Mennonite settings and characters.
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.
