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.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on how legends are often dehumanized and stripped of their relatable qualities, leading to a perpetual cycle of loss.
Miriam Toews' quote suggests that once someone reaches legendary status, the aspects that make them relatable and human are overshadowed by their mythologized persona. This transformation can create a sense of alienation, as the individual is no longer perceived as a person with flaws and experiences, but rather as a symbol or ideal, resulting in a painful loss of identity and connection to humanity.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech reflecting on the impact of fame, one could use this quote to illustrate the sacrifices made in the pursuit of legendary status.
More from Miriam Toews
All quotes →My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'
There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
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.
Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.
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.
Similar quotes
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.
We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'
We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time, what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally, God's light shines through the tapestry, and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence.
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.