A Complicated Kindness

by

Miriam Toews

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on A Complicated Kindness makes teaching easy.

Nomi Nickel Character Analysis

The novel’s narrator and protagonist, a 17-year-old girl chafing at the restrictions of Mennonite life in the small town of East Village, Canada. Nomi is intelligent and precocious but doesn’t like to play by her community’s rules: she reads novels and philosophy in her spare time, but refuses to complete homework that she doesn’t like and eventually stops attending school altogether. Nomi is doubtful of the existence of God and distrustful of religious dogma. She distances herself from her community by experimenting with drugs and alcohol and cultivating a transgressive relationship with her boyfriend, Travis. Despite her tough personality and iconoclastic tendencies, Nomi is deeply kind and empathetic. She is quick to help others who are vulnerable and overlooked, maintains friendships with people deeply committed to the Mennonite way of life, like the widow Mrs. Peters or her devout friend Lids, and she’s often wistful for her childhood days of uncomplicated belief and happiness within the Mennonite community. Nomi’s adolescence is shaped by the breakup of her family: her sister Tash has left the community with her boyfriend, and her mother Trudie has been cast out for adultery. As the novel progresses Nomi must decide whether to leave home for good, as her sister and mother did, or emulate her father Ray, who stays loyal to the Mennonite community despite religious doubts and grief for his missing wife and daughter. By the end of the novel, Nomi has both learned to appreciate her community and the ways in which it has shaped her positively, and developed the confidence and independence to build a new life.

Nomi Nickel Quotes in A Complicated Kindness

The A Complicated Kindness quotes below are all either spoken by Nomi Nickel or refer to Nomi Nickel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Religion and Dogma Theme Icon
).
Chapter One Quotes

Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control. He says we will know when it happens, the ending. I don’t know about that I feel that there are so many to choose from.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

There’s an invisible force that exerts a steady pressure on our words like a hand to an open, spurting wound. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death of his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven and with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Six Quotes

But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. When they ask me how my dad is, for instance, and mean how am I managing without my mother.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lane of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not really real.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wandering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eight Quotes

Did he get stitches, I asked.

Yes, she said, right here. She touched her temple.

How many, I asked. She loved to answer questions about Clayton.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Mrs. Peters, Clayton Peters
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Ten Quotes

She once asked me and the other girls in our class if we were gymnasts, but really fat ones, would we think we could just go out and win an Olympic medal one day? No? Well, that’s what Christianity is all about, she said.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twelve Quotes

Travis had suggested I broaden my horizons and attempt to finish my thoughts. He said I should make a list of ways to improve. Oh that’ll help, I thought.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eighteen Quotes

I didn’t know why she was crying, until I heard my mom say honey, what is it? What’s wrong? And Tash said: I think I’ll go crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s all a fucking lie. It’s killing me! Mom, it really is! And then something happened that took me completely by surprise, I heard my mom say, I know honey, I know it is.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:

My mom put some blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and carried it out to Ian’s truck. She put bread and fruit and the fresh ham she’d bought that day into a box and Ian carried that out.

I remembered my mom telling us about the Mennonites in Russia fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free. All they needed, she said, was for people to tolerate their unique apartness.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel, Ian
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

And even though tears in my throat were starting to suffocate me, in the nick of time I remembered Travis telling me once that I was boring when I was offended, and to be boring was the ultimate crime, and I put my head back and made a laughing sound.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-One Quotes

Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.

Related Characters: Trudie Nickel (speaker), Nomi Nickel, The Mouth
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Two Quotes

I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, The Mouth, Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Three Quotes

I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.

We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel
Related Symbols: Nomi’s House
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m pretty sure she left town for his sake. It would have killed him to choose between her or the church. The only decision he’d ever made without her help was to wear a suit and tie every day of his life. How could he stand up and publicly denounce a woman he loved more than anything in the world. And how could he turn away from the church that could, someday, forgive his wife and secure their future together in paradise, for all time.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Four Quotes

Heaven is always calm, with no wind. She said other stuff but I didn’t really understand it. I understood there was no wind in heaven. That’s partly why I love the wind that blows around in this town. It makes me feel like I’m in the world.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Nicodemus
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:

We drove to the pits and rinsed the purple gas off in the water which made it beautiful and we floated around in gassy rainbows for hours talking about stuff and lighting the gas with Travis’s lighter so it was like we were in hell. Rainbow pools of fire in the pits, the smell of smoking stubble, the hot wind, dying chickens, the night, my childhood.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:

And we counted cars with American plates­—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, The Mouth
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Five Quotes

When I got to school I told my teacher I was on cloud nine. I told her I was so happy I thought I could fly. I told her I felt so great I wanted to dance like Fred Astaire.

She said life was not a dream. And dancing was a sin. Now get off it and sit back down. It was the first time in my life I had been aware of my own existence.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Eight Quotes

Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is in our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church—there it was as it always has been, what a tradition—and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:

Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire A Complicated Kindness LitChart as a printable PDF.
A Complicated Kindness PDF

Nomi Nickel Quotes in A Complicated Kindness

The A Complicated Kindness quotes below are all either spoken by Nomi Nickel or refer to Nomi Nickel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Religion and Dogma Theme Icon
).
Chapter One Quotes

Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control. He says we will know when it happens, the ending. I don’t know about that I feel that there are so many to choose from.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

There’s an invisible force that exerts a steady pressure on our words like a hand to an open, spurting wound. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death of his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven and with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Six Quotes

But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. When they ask me how my dad is, for instance, and mean how am I managing without my mother.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lane of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not really real.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wandering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eight Quotes

Did he get stitches, I asked.

Yes, she said, right here. She touched her temple.

How many, I asked. She loved to answer questions about Clayton.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Mrs. Peters, Clayton Peters
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Ten Quotes

She once asked me and the other girls in our class if we were gymnasts, but really fat ones, would we think we could just go out and win an Olympic medal one day? No? Well, that’s what Christianity is all about, she said.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twelve Quotes

Travis had suggested I broaden my horizons and attempt to finish my thoughts. He said I should make a list of ways to improve. Oh that’ll help, I thought.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eighteen Quotes

I didn’t know why she was crying, until I heard my mom say honey, what is it? What’s wrong? And Tash said: I think I’ll go crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s all a fucking lie. It’s killing me! Mom, it really is! And then something happened that took me completely by surprise, I heard my mom say, I know honey, I know it is.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:

My mom put some blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and carried it out to Ian’s truck. She put bread and fruit and the fresh ham she’d bought that day into a box and Ian carried that out.

I remembered my mom telling us about the Mennonites in Russia fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free. All they needed, she said, was for people to tolerate their unique apartness.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel, Ian
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

And even though tears in my throat were starting to suffocate me, in the nick of time I remembered Travis telling me once that I was boring when I was offended, and to be boring was the ultimate crime, and I put my head back and made a laughing sound.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-One Quotes

Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.

Related Characters: Trudie Nickel (speaker), Nomi Nickel, The Mouth
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Two Quotes

I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, The Mouth, Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Three Quotes

I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.

We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel
Related Symbols: Nomi’s House
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m pretty sure she left town for his sake. It would have killed him to choose between her or the church. The only decision he’d ever made without her help was to wear a suit and tie every day of his life. How could he stand up and publicly denounce a woman he loved more than anything in the world. And how could he turn away from the church that could, someday, forgive his wife and secure their future together in paradise, for all time.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Four Quotes

Heaven is always calm, with no wind. She said other stuff but I didn’t really understand it. I understood there was no wind in heaven. That’s partly why I love the wind that blows around in this town. It makes me feel like I’m in the world.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Nicodemus
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:

We drove to the pits and rinsed the purple gas off in the water which made it beautiful and we floated around in gassy rainbows for hours talking about stuff and lighting the gas with Travis’s lighter so it was like we were in hell. Rainbow pools of fire in the pits, the smell of smoking stubble, the hot wind, dying chickens, the night, my childhood.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Travis
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:

And we counted cars with American plates­—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, The Mouth
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Five Quotes

When I got to school I told my teacher I was on cloud nine. I told her I was so happy I thought I could fly. I told her I felt so great I wanted to dance like Fred Astaire.

She said life was not a dream. And dancing was a sin. Now get off it and sit back down. It was the first time in my life I had been aware of my own existence.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker)
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twenty-Eight Quotes

Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is in our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church—there it was as it always has been, what a tradition—and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Trudie Nickel, Mr. Quiring
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:

Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.

Related Characters: Nomi Nickel (speaker), Ray Nickel, Trudie Nickel, Tash Nickel
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis: