Top 250 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Sometimes love is a pie. There just isn’t enough to go around. Or OK, maybe there is enough love, but not enough time and attention, so you have to grab your piece, and then the pie smashes and you’re fighting for crumbs...”

— Emma Donoghue

102. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

103. “A fast didn’t go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.”

— Emma Donoghue

104. “We go in a skyscraper that’s Paul’s office, he says he’s crazy busy but he makes a Xerox of my hands and buys me a candy bar out of the vending machine. Going down in the elevator pressing the buttons, I play I’m actually inside a vending machine. We go in a bit of the government to get Grandma a new Social Security card because she lost the old one, we have to wait for years and years. Afterwards she takes me in a coffee shop where there’s no green beans, I choose a cookie bigger than my face.”

— Emma Donoghue

105. “You must feel an almost pathological need – understandably – to stand guard between your son and the world.” “Yeah, it’s called being a mother.” Ma nearly snarls it.”

— Emma Donoghue

106. “Under the thousand crystal candelabras I danced with ten elderly gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only, Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so?”

— Emma Donoghue

107. “When I was four I was watching ants walking up Stove and she ran and splatted them all so they wouldn’t eat our food. One minute they were alive and the next minute they were dirt. I cried so my eyes nearly melted off.”

— Emma Donoghue

108. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

109. “Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray – that’s the sound of God listening.”

— Emma Donoghue

110. “Me acuerdo de ser educado, que es cuando la gente tiene miedo de que los otros se enfaden.”

— Emma Donoghue

111. “I bang my head on a faucet. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt?”

— Emma Donoghue

112. “Ma’s in Room still, I want her here so much much much.”

— Emma Donoghue

113. “Better to drown in the surf than stand idly by the shore.”

— Emma Donoghue

114. “How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized – as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.”

— Emma Donoghue

115. “We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism.”

— Emma Donoghue

116. “If you’re sorry, folks can tell. No use piling on the verbiage.”

— Emma Donoghue

117. “Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.”

— Emma Donoghue

118. “All I think when I look at you is hallelujah.”

— Emma Donoghue

119. “If Earth was such unworthy soil for God’s best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there?”

— Emma Donoghue

120. “Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.”

— Emma Donoghue

121. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt? Grandma.”

— Emma Donoghue

122. “And why must it always be presumed that a woman’s views are based on personal considerations?”

— Emma Donoghue

123. “So then she took me home, or I took her home, or we were both somehow taken to the closest thing.”

— Emma Donoghue

124. “On the whole I am inclined to think that a witch should not kiss. Perhaps it is the not being kissed that makes her a witch; perhaps the source of her power is the breath of loneliness around her.”

— Emma Donoghue

125. “Guilt was the sooty air we breathed these days.”

— Emma Donoghue

126. “Please,” he added. “I meant to say, please. I’ve thought it all through. I’ve thought of nothing else. I haven’t read a book in weeks!”

— Emma Donoghue

127. “So when one spring in spite of all this good advice I fell in love, it felt like disaster. I took a tiny bite and it exploded in my stomach. Love splashed through every cranny, hauled on every muscle, unlocked every joint. I was so full of astonishment, I felt ten feet tall. My shoulders itched as if wings might break through.”

— Emma Donoghue

128. “The whole point of travel is to learn there’s no such thing as normal.”

— Emma Donoghue

129. “Only for the duration, of course, for the foreseeable future, as the posters said. Though I was having trouble foreseeing any future. How would we ever get back to normal after the pandemic.”

— Emma Donoghue

130. “I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn’t wait, why didn’t she wait for me?”

— Emma Donoghue

131. “The hammock hangs on hooks in two trees at the very back of the yard, one is a shortish tree that’s only twice my tall and bent over, one is a million times high with silvery leaves.”

— Emma Donoghue

132. “Las personas se mueven tanto por el mundo que constantemente se pierden cosas.”

— Emma Donoghue

133. “The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.”

— Emma Donoghue

134. “Houses are like lots of Rooms stuck together, TV persons stay in them mostly but sometimes they go in their outsides and weather happens to them.”

— Emma Donoghue

135. “Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.”

— Emma Donoghue

136. “I tell you frankly, Mrs. Damer, the more I see of different nations, the less sure I feel about the pre-eminence of my own.”

— Emma Donoghue

137. “So this was liberty. Mary was beginning to recognise the taste of it in her mouth: terror salting the sweetness.”

— Emma Donoghue

138. “That’s tree persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it’s nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They’re all saying till I hurt. “Stop all saying at the same time.”

— Emma Donoghue

139. “All the women I knew carried some kind of blade, though they were not all metal, or even visible. Whether something had happened to them, or whether they had only anticipated it, it kept them awake the occasional night.”

— Emma Donoghue

140. “I don’t know why hurting means getting better.”

— Emma Donoghue

141. “It does sometimes seem as if the nineteenth century hasn’t reached this part of the world yet.” He.”

— Emma Donoghue

142. “The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she’d rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else’s whim; her days were spent obeying someone else’s rules, working for someone else’s profit. Nothing was Mary’s anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.”

— Emma Donoghue

143. “They’re her book club but I don’t know why because they’re not reading books.”

— Emma Donoghue

144. “This flu was clogging the whole works of the hospital. Not just the hospital, I reminded myself – the whole of Dublin. The whole country. As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs.”

— Emma Donoghue

145. “I pray for John the Baptist and Baby Jesus to come around for a playdate with Dora and Boots.”

— Emma Donoghue

146. “Now I feel bad I didn’t give her the second quarter. Grandma says that’s called having a conscience.”

— Emma Donoghue

147. “In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn’t want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.”

— Emma Donoghue

148. “She gets sick of things fast, it’s from being an adult.”

— Emma Donoghue

149. “Little by little; the way out of the mine was as long as the way in.”

— Emma Donoghue

150. “She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.”

— Emma Donoghue