Best Of Miriam Toews' "Women Talking"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Women Talking: A Novel by Miriam Toews.

If the houses are made to be dismantled, impermanent, and if by dismantling the houses time and time again they erode into dust, then mustn't we let them? That's what they're made to do. If we don't want our houses to erode then we must, in the first place, make them in a different way. But surely we can't preserve houses that were built to disappear.

p.200

Life was the only thing. Migration, movement, freedom. We want to protect our children and we want to think. We want to keep our faith. We want the world. Do we want the world? If I'm outside of it, my life outside it, outside of my life, if my life isn't in the world, then what good is it? To teach? To teach what, if not the world?

p. 208-209

Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?

p.214