(Miriam Toews)

• ...he pulled me close to him and he asked me to please stop talking, to stop shivering, to stop blocking the door, to stop crying and to stop loving him.
  • I asked him how I was supposed to do that and he said no, Irma, we're not kids anymore, don't say anything else. I wanted to ask him what loving him had to do with being childish but I did what he told me to do and I kept my mouth shut. (pg. 2)
• I wanted to tell him that I had tried most of my life to do things that would make people stay too, and that none of them had worked out, but then I thought that if I said that our relationship would always be defined by failure. (pg. 6)
• She told me that the sun and the moon are the two eyes of God and when one disappears the other one pops up to keep spying on us. When we can see them both at the same time we're in big trouble and all we can do is run. (pg. 11)
• I knew more about the social significance of birdsong, I realized, than I did about human interaction. (pg. 36)
• I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas or words that by their definition promised love. (pg. 43)
• Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.
  • Because I would start to love them, he said. (pg. 56)
• You haven't told me your names.
  • I know, I said. I'm sorry.
  • I understand, he said. I'm a cab driver. Nothing surprises me.
  • That's good, I said.
  • No, said Gustavo, it's a tragedy. (pg. 157)
• I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition. (pg. 171)