Top 250 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.”

— Emma Donoghue

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Boldness Quotes, Encouragement Quotes, Overcoming Fear Quotes, Moving Forward Quotes

2. “Everyone’s got a different story.”

— Emma Donoghue

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.”

— Emma Donoghue

4. “The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it’s going to be the next minute.”

— Emma Donoghue

5. “I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened.”

— Emma Donoghue

6. “You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.”

— Emma Donoghue

7. “There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.”

— Emma Donoghue

8. “It’s painful to consider anything but writing.”

— Emma Donoghue

9. “Perhaps we get, not what we deserve, but what we demand.”

— Emma Donoghue

10. “You know who you belong to Jack? – Yeah. Yourself. – He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma. p. 261 Room by E Donoghue.”

— Emma Donoghue

11. “Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.”

— Emma Donoghue

12. “People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.”

— Emma Donoghue

13. “The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.”

— Emma Donoghue

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

14. “Ma’s still nodding. “You’re the one who matters, though. Just you.” I shake my head till it’s wobbling because there’s no just me.”

— Emma Donoghue

15. “I think about Old Nick carrying me into the truck, I’m dizzy like I’m going to fall down. “Scared is what you’re feeling,” says Ma, “but brave is what you’re doing.” “Huh?” “Scaredybrave.” “Scave.” Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn’t being funny.”

— Emma Donoghue

16. “Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it’s ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?”

— Emma Donoghue

17. “People are locked up in all sorts of ways.”

— Emma Donoghue

18. “I must say, in the case of “Room,” both the book and the film, I don’t think being a lesbian author held me back at all.”

— Emma Donoghue

19. “I’ve been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it’s never inspired me to write anything. It’s too good – nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that’s what makes for good stories.”

— Emma Donoghue

20. “I guess the feminism in “Room” springs to mind most.”

— Emma Donoghue

21. “Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.”

— Emma Donoghue

22. “Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.”

— Emma Donoghue

23. “There’s not a thing wrong with you, you’re right the whole way through.”

— Emma Donoghue

24. “I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away – meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic, but to find a cinematic equivalent.”

— Emma Donoghue

25. “For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it’s not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you’ll ever have.”

— Emma Donoghue

26. “Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet.”

— Emma Donoghue

27. “It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

— Emma Donoghue

28. “Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman.”

— Emma Donoghue

29. “With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.”

— Emma Donoghue

30. “I got in the habit of giving away a book as soon as I’ve finished it because I lived in a housing co-op at Cambridge and had no space to keep books.”

— Emma Donoghue

31. “I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.”

— Emma Donoghue

32. “Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.”

— Emma Donoghue

33. “I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.”

— Emma Donoghue

34. “That night my new skin was red silk, shivering in the breeze.”

— Emma Donoghue

35. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

36. “Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She’d been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she’d done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.”

— Emma Donoghue

37. “What does a promise mean, when it’s made to a monster?”

— Emma Donoghue

38. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

39. “Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.”

— Emma Donoghue

40. “Everybody’s damaged by something.”

— Emma Donoghue

41. “Stories are a different kind of true.”

— Emma Donoghue

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

42. “Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.”

— Emma Donoghue

Featured in: Reading Quotes

43. “Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I’ve had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you’re trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.”

— Emma Donoghue

44. “And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.”

— Emma Donoghue

45. “If I was made of cake I’d eat myself before somebody else could.”

— Emma Donoghue

46. “Me and Ma have a deal, we’re going to try everything one time so we know what we like.”

— Emma Donoghue

47. “People move around so much in the world, things get lost.”

— Emma Donoghue

48. “We used to call it her Cinderella complex, because often when she had agreed to go out in the evening she would be seized by panic and announce that she had nothing to wear.”

— Emma Donoghue

49. “I remember manners, that’s when people are scared to make other persons mad.”

— Emma Donoghue

50. “If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.”

— Emma Donoghue