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Miriam Toews

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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.' - Miriam Toews
#Father
#Friend
#Iron
#Money
#Time
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. - Miriam Toews
#Character
#Failure
#Imagination
#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. - Miriam Toews
#Busy
#Fast
#Life
#Long
#Search
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. - Miriam Toews
#Feel
#Me
#Serious
#Way
#World
We don't choose the books we write; they choose us. - Miriam Toews
#Books
#Choose
#Us
#Write
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. - Miriam Toews
#Chaos
#Experience
#Grief
#Me
#Understand
In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences. - Miriam Toews
#Free
#I Can
#Life
#My Life
#Writing
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. - Miriam Toews
#Care
#Family
#Help
#Just
#People
There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine. - Miriam Toews
#Age
#Me
#Soul
#Than
#World
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. - Miriam Toews
#Better
#Brain
#Experience
#Feel
#Will
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. - Miriam Toews
#Know
#Place
#Rock
#Us
#Waves
I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies. - Miriam Toews
#Canadian
#Middle
#Small
#Town
#Years
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. - Miriam Toews
#Authority
#Culture
#Feel
#Myself
#See
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.' - Miriam Toews
#Debate
#Life
#Pain
#Person
#Suicide
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. - Miriam Toews
#Father
#Me
#Smile
#Way
#Winning
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