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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences. Miriam Toews Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I have a problem with beginnings… and endings… and middles. But I don’t know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it’s physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog. Miriam Toews Read Quote
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 Read Quote
At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master’s degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead. Miriam Toews Read Quote