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. Miriam Toews Read Quote
I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Miriam Toews Read Quote
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. Miriam Toews Read Quote
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. Miriam Toews Read Quote
I don’t even know what ‘successful’ means. We’re all failures. Look at the world. We’re all complicit. Miriam Toews Read Quote
There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in Heaven and Hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to Heaven. Miriam Toews Read Quote
I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it’s a beautiful thing, and it is, but there’s so much going on besides. Miriam Toews Read Quote
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. Miriam Toews Read Quote
