Home > Author > Emma Donoghue
81 " better keep your mouth shut and seem stupid than open it and remove all doubt. "
― Emma Donoghue , Frog Music
82 " Your body - every body is a marvel. A wonder of creation. [...] The day your first opened your eyes, Anna, God asked just one thing: that you live. "
― Emma Donoghue , The Wonder
83 " Who knows what we all are before anything happens? "
― Emma Donoghue , Stir-Fry
84 " coffee’s the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car. "
― Emma Donoghue , Room
85 " No, I mean everything feels different, but it’s because I’m different. "
86 " I thought humans were or weren't, I didn't know someone could be a bit human. Then what are his other bits? "
87 " Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman. "
― Emma Donoghue , Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
88 " Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear. "
89 " One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again. "
90 " Perhaps there is no providence, no fate, no grand plan, she thinks now. Perhaps we dig our own traps and lie down in them. "
― Emma Donoghue , The Sealed Letter
91 " I chop the broccoli into pieces with ZigZag Knife, sometimes I swallow some when Ma's not looking and she says, "Oh, no, where's that big bit gone?" but she's not really mad because raw things make us extra alive. "
92 " Jack. He'd never give us a phone, or a window. "Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. "We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it. "
93 " May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage. "
94 " Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing. "
95 " Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib's experience, those who wouldn't cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they'd entered and what they'd done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives' smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets. "
96 " If Earth was such unworthy soil for God's best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there? "
97 " But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he's gone out. "Keep it," say Steppa. "But what about when he comes home? "
98 " Fate was faceless, life arbitrary, a tale told by an idiot. "
99 " Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine—that was the doctors’ domain—but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation. "
100 " Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no? "