Miriam Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Miriam Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
I question the negative connotations of fabric, of ribbon, of lace. I turn these symbols of our imprisonment around.— Miriam Schapiro
I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay he shouted. All right We have to get you a stick We have to get tape I'll be waiting in the car— Miriam Toews
I told her [...] that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that she could control her life, that I understood that pain is sometimes psychic, not only physical, that she wanted nothing more than to end it and to sleep forever, that for her life was over but that for me it was still ongoing and that an aspect of it was trying to save her, that the notion of saving her was one that we didn't agree on, that I was willing to do whatever she wanted me to do but only if it was absolutely true that there were no other doors to find, to push against or storm because if there were I'd break every bone in my body running up against that fucking door repeatedly, over and over and over and over.— Miriam Toews
![Miriam Sayings By Miriam Toews: I told her [...] that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/miriam-sayings-by-miriam-toews-309112.jpg "Miriam Sayings By Miriam Toews: I told her [...] that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that")
I heard Tash say: Nomi, you're sad man. Get a grip. Walk away. What have I taught you? And I thought: You taught me that some people can leave and some can't and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those you can't and I'm one of the ones who can't because you're one of the ones who did and there's this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much.— Miriam Toews
The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.— Peter Gizzi
Nic loves Elf's odd requests, each one is like a holiday for him ... and he's not a Mennonite, which is important— Miriam Toews
in a man
for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame.
She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself— Miriam Toews
We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.— Miriam Toews
I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.— Miriam Makeba
Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.— Miriam Toews
My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit out right back out of him and filled the silent part of their lives with books and coffee and other things.— Miriam Toews
Well there is a lot of work here for younger and older musicians now. Our Ministry of Culture has now really embarked on changing things for artists, and it is getting much better. We just have to organize ourselves as artists, and then things will be better.— Miriam Makeba
It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God's will. It's hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have emptiness.— Miriam Toews
He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.— Miriam Toews
Miriam snorted. It was not a very ladylike snort. She was the sort of woman one expected to find tramping the countryside in tweeds with a gun under her arm and a bulldog at her side, probably one of her own breeding.— Marie Brennan
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
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
In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.— Miriam Toews
Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.— Miriam Makeba
Age is getting to know all the ways the world turns, so that if you cannot turn the world the way you want, you can at least get out of the way so you won't get run over.— Miriam Makeba
She suddenly began to jump up and down, screaming at the top of her lungs. "The arks are after me! The arks are after me! Help me, the arks are after me!"— Ted Dekker
...
"The arks! You don't understand, I have the ring and the arks are after me!"
...
(and so the police officer is puzzled long enough for Miriam and Seth to escape)
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
I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising,— Miriam Makeba
In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.— Miriam Makeba
I ask you and all the leaders of the world: Would you act differently, would you keep silent and do nothing if you were in our place? Would you not resist if you were allowed no rights in your own country because the color of your skin is different to that of the rulers, and if you were punished for even asking for equality? I appeal to you, and through you to all the countries of the world, to do everything you can to stop the coming tragedy. I appeal to you to save the lives of our leaders, to empty the prisons of all those who should never have been there.— Miriam Makeba
Belafonte sent his people to pick me up and I went back and shook his hand, then went back to my little flat. I was very happy to have met a president of the United States - little me!— Miriam Makeba
In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land,— Miriam Makeba
There are three things I was born with in this world, and there are three things I will have until the day I die-hope, determination, and song.— Miriam Makeba
Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.— Miriam N. Kotzin
If ever there was a sentence more quickly imprinted in my consciousness, more oft repeated, one that stood as more of an arbiter against which to judge all else, I do not know it. In the beginning, the repetition was the numb sort, the words impenetrable. Only occasionally did they have the power to stop me midstep as I walked upstairs. Or seize my stomach as I ate. Or clear my head as I attempted to speak.— Miriam Gershow
Books are what save us. Books are what don't save us.— Miriam Toews
Miriam Were has made outstanding contributions to public health in the developing world. She brings basic medical services to women and children in East Africa.— Liya Kebede
You can't force someone to love you. All you can do is be lovable, then hope for the best".— Miriam Polli
Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.— Miriam Toews
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
And then, somehow she knew that God was not the light, and God was not the darkness, and not anybody at all. Maybe, God was not...— Miriam Katin
You always say oh, that's so unprofessional as though there's some definition of professional that's also a moral imperative for how to behave.— Miriam Toews
Let whoever opens a door make certain there are no enemies hiding behind it.— Miriam Minger
When I put the poncho on to show Elf she said farewell to arms.— Miriam Toews
I have no illusions about myself, about my life, about leaving a legacy, or making a mark in people's lives. We are so insignificant. We are only here for a blink.— Miriam Defensor Santiago
There are a lot of homes for boys, but very few for girls, that is why I chose to do for girls.— Miriam Makeba
I went back into my bedroom and knelt at my bed the way I did when I was a kid. I folded my hands and pressed the top knuckle joints of my thumbs hard into my forehead. Dear God. I don't know what I want or who I am. Apparently you do. Um ... that's great. Never mind. You have a terrible reputation here. You should know that. Oh, but I guess you do know that. Save me now. Or when it's convenient. We could run away together. This is stupid. What am I doing? I guess this is a prayer. I feel like an idiot, but I guess you knew that already, too. My sister said that god is music. Goodbye, Amen. I lay in my bed and waited for that thick, sweet feeling to wash over me, for that unreal semi-conscious state where the story begins and takes on a life of its own and all you have to do is close your eyes and give in and let go and give in and let go and go and go and go.— Miriam Toews
I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.— Miriam Makeba
I look at a stream and I see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day, disappear - flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.— Miriam Makeba
In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home.— Miriam Makeba
One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.— Miriam Toews
No type of therapy compares to accomplishing heavy and intimidating goals.— Miriam Khalladi
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
We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.— Miriam Toews
When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.— Anna Funder
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
Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?— Peter Orner
I didn't have much, but I was always happy to share what I did have. It seemed like every African that came to New York City would show up at my apartment door at dinnertime, and I couldn't turn them away. I wasn't much older than any of them, but they started calling me 'Mama Africa' and the name stuck.— Miriam Makeba
Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy.— Miriam Toews
You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.— Miriam Adeney
I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.— Miriam Toews
But if you are going to wear blinders then you do not know the world.— Miriam Makeba
Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly.— Guillermo Del Toro
Considering it, he realized that somehow he never worried about Miriam, and that was wrong. He did not worry about her because she seemed so self-sufficient, so strong. She was like their mother had been, only more so, much more so. But he felt it was wrong to think of a girl that way ... It was wrong for any man to consider a girl self-sufficient, for men wanted to do something for a woman and when there was nothing they could do, there was no place for love.— Louis L'Amour
Love was, he suspected, much a matter of service. One loved and was loved, as one needed and was needed. Or so it seemed to him.
[Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching I did not take part, because I was not a citizen— Miriam Makeba
![Miriam Sayings By Miriam Makeba: [Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/miriam-sayings-by-miriam-makeba-346725.jpg "Miriam Sayings By Miriam Makeba: [Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching")
This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.— Miriam Toews
When we got back to the house Logan grabbed his basketball, threw it really hard against the hallway wall, knocked the framed family photo to the floor-it didn't break, he didn't pick it up-and left with a couple of his friends. Thebes picked up the photo, hung it back on the wall, sighed heavily like she'd travelled to every corner of the world, on her knees, with a knife in her back and a boa constrictor wrapped around her chest, and then made us a couple of blueberry smoothies.— Miriam Toews
Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside.— Miriam Toews
He offered you a what? she yelled.
An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush.
What is it? she said.
Coffee! I yelled.
Irma, can I come and live
I turned around again and began to run.
It was hard to be away from home, but I am glad that I am home now.— Miriam Makeba
How can a motion picture reflect real life when it is made by people who are living artificial lives?— Miriam Hopkins
Without a whole lot of pressure, a diamond is just a piece of coal.— Miriam Darnell
Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.— Miriam Toews
Because I would start to love them, he said.
Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.— Miriam Elia
The Sleep lasted six hours. For most of that time John lay beside Miriam watching the shadows.— Whitley Strieber
In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We'd been through all of this before. We loved each other. We fought for each other. When worlds collapsed we were buried in the rubble together and when we were dug out of the rubble and rescued we all celebrated together.— Miriam Toews
Remember what mom used to say? "Shred the guilt.— Miriam Toews
Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all.I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room ... Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids.— Miriam Toews
Real life is like that - it does not follow a neat plan. sometimes you have to get things very messily wrong so you can see how to get them right.— Miriam Morrison
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.— Miriam Toews
I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word.— Miriam Toews
When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.— Miriam Toews
We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.— Mordecai Richler
She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named - when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.— Miriam Toews
What's more, she lacked the good sense to understand how our lives are enriched by the minor interactions that present themselves every day.— Miriam Karmel
Through the early 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck established her reputation in a field overflowing with other young Broadway starlets: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Joan Blondell. Barbara was lower-keyed and less mannered than Davis and Hepburn; less glamorous than Colbert. She was "real," and she also proved to be the personification of no-nonsense professionalism, making her popular with directors and coworkers alike.— Eve Golden
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
A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you— 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
I shall be honored to go to jail. Under a dictatorship, the detention cell is a place of honor.— Miriam Defensor Santiago
You should know something, Miriam ... God changed our futures yesterday. There's no other explanation for what happened. And it wasn't the first God. If you ever need hlep, you might want to try the second God.— Ted Dekker
My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.— Miriam Toews
The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.— Miriam Toews
I know that I will go to my grave as Professor Sprout, whatever else I've done.— Miriam Margolyes
I cannot live without you, Gwendolyn, nor can I believe the gods have brought us through so much only to tear us apart again. If I must face the possibility of death, then so be it.— Miriam Minger
And Miriam also refused to be approached. She was afraid of being set at nought, as by her own brothers. The girl was romantic in her soul. Everywhere was a Walter Scott heroine being loved by men with helmets or with plumes in their caps. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination. And she was afraid lest this boy, who, nevertheless, looked something like a Walter Scott hero, who could paint and speak French, and knew what algebra meant, and who went by train to Nottingham every day, might consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess beneath; so she held aloof.— D.H. Lawrence
I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds.— Miriam Toews
[Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado - be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly.— Miriam Makeba
![Miriam Sayings By Miriam Makeba: [Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/miriam-sayings-by-miriam-makeba-569375.jpg "Miriam Sayings By Miriam Makeba: [Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great")
Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence. Miriam could have been denounced— Anna Funder
Dare beyond your strength, hazard beyond your judgment, and in extremities, proceed in excellent hope. Bare the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.— Miriam Defensor Santiago
For instance, we're always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from - with what? The very resources we need to keep there.— Miriam Makeba
[Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]— Miriam Gurko
"The women shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord they God." - Deutronomy 22:5
![Miriam Sayings By Miriam Gurko: [Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]"The](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/miriam-sayings-by-miriam-gurko-616739.jpg "Miriam Sayings By Miriam Gurko: [Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]\"The")
Awesome people come in shy packages.— Miriam Shattuck
The women kept their smiles, although both their thumping hearts dropped from their throats to land hard back in their rib cages. For Miriam at least, this was less a metaphor, as siren hearts wandered a bit through their bodies depending on their mood. But to be accurate, hers hadn't risen all the way to her throat, stopping as high as her sternum before sliding its way down and resting on her bladder, thus adding a need to urinate to her disappointment.— A. Lee Martinez
I do not subscribe to the school of thought that I am leading the presidential polls because of my beautiful legs.— Miriam
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.— Miriam Toews
