All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 459-463 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 9:27:32 PM
I tell her all right, I’ll leave but I’ll be back tomorrow. 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 towards the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 588-589 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 9:45:16 PM
She told me her loneliness was visceral, a sack of rocks she carried from one room to the next, city to city.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 628-629 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 9:49:58 PM
I hung up and threw the phone into the river. I didn’t throw the phone into the river. I stopped myself at the last second and muffled something like an already muffled scream.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 629-630 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 9:50:45 PM
Bartleby the Scrivener preferred not to until he preferred not to work, not to eat, not to do anything, and died under a tree.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1024-1026 | Added on Tuesday, October 31, 2023 11:01:51 PM
She still writes them letters and cards, or did until very recently, in different colours of ink, pink and green and orange, her distinct handwriting that reminded me of horses racing to the finish line, encouraging them to be brave, to enjoy life, to know how proud she is of them and how much she loves them.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1175-1178 | Added on Sunday, November 5, 2023 10:56:22 PM
Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1193-1197 | Added on Sunday, November 5, 2023 10:59:40 PM
Finally I asked Janice about the pills. I asked her what was in them. What was the active ingredient? Do they give her the impression that there is meaning to life or do they flatten her to the point where she doesn’t care if there is or isn’t? Or do they enhance what is already in her mind and make it all right so that Elf could conceivably jump out of bed some morning and say hooray, it’s true, there is no meaning to life but it’s okay and now that I really know it and have had it confirmed and can stop searching for it I can go on living!
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1224-1225 | Added on Sunday, November 5, 2023 11:03:23 PM
If I can say things over and over they’ll eventually lose their meaning and my anger will disappear.
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All My Puny Sorrows (Toews, Miriam)
- Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1432-1435 | Added on Tuesday, November 7, 2023 11:25:15 PM
Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music. I remember humming that refrain over and over, singing myself to sleep with those lyrics in the days before my father kneeled in the path of a fast-moving train.
