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Miriam Toews


Canadian
1964
Writer
waterfall dolomites landscape
We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.


Miriam Toews
Tags: Us Write Books
The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me.
Miriam Toews
Tags: Me Very Love
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
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
Tags: You Life Even
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 It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.
Miriam Toews
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
Tags: Me Know Very
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
Tags: Me Like About
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
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
Tags: Think Who Really