Top 250 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “So much of motherhood is acting.”

— Emma Donoghue

152. “But no, I used all my brave up.”

— Emma Donoghue

153. “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?”

— Emma Donoghue

154. “We spend most of our lives holding on to objects, he thought, and finally they fall from our cold dead hands and those who tidy up after us have to worry of what to do with all this stuff.”

— Emma Donoghue

155. “He supposed it was always that way with the dead, they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions.”

— Emma Donoghue

156. “What this good man had sworn to protect me from was not the same as what I feared. I trusted that he would never let anything hurt me, but he would never let anything touch me either.”

— Emma Donoghue

157. “My names were hand-me-downs too: girl, the creature, or, most often, you there.”

— Emma Donoghue

158. “I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.”

— Emma Donoghue

159. “Pretending to misremember a name was such a reliable way to annoy.”

— Emma Donoghue

160. “My future was about to happen.”

— Emma Donoghue

161. “It seemed to him that there was some urgency in the air, but then he always felt like that in February: a sense of something breaking out through his skin.”

— Emma Donoghue

162. “The watch has altered the situation that’s being watched.”

— Emma Donoghue

163. “Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.”

— Emma Donoghue

164. “It depends on the monster, if it’s a real one or not and if it’s where I am.”

— Emma Donoghue

165. “It was Anubis who set your heart on the scales against the Feather of Truth, and if your crimes weighed it down at all, it was thrown to the crocodile-faced demoness Ammit like any other scrap of meat. Only the clean-hearted got to walk forever in the Field of Reeds.”

— Emma Donoghue

166. “Work will be your mother, she whispered; it will lead you through dark days; it will clear you a level place to rest at last.”

— Emma Donoghue

167. “It came to Daffy then, how easily the worst in oneself could rise up and strike a blow. How even the most enlightened man had little power over his own darkness.”

— Emma Donoghue

168. “The Times had announced that seven thousand pounds had been raised to send a party of Englishwomen to the Crimea as nurses. That, Lib had thought, with dread but also a sense of daring, I believe I could do that. She’d lost so much already, she was reckless. All.”

— Emma Donoghue

169. “Sitting watching Anna’s eyelids flicker some hours later, Lib found herself longing for the sleep she should have had that afternoon. But this was an old battle, and like any nurse, she knew she could win if she spoke to herself severely enough. The.”

— Emma Donoghue

170. “At the balls he took me to there were many beautiful young women who didn’t say a word. They answered every question with a shrug or a smile. If champagne got spilt down their dresses they only sighed; when the full moon slid out from behind the castle they watched it in silence. I could not understand it. Had they sold their voices too? Even their bodies were silent, always upright, never loosening their lines. They walked like letters on a page.”

— Emma Donoghue

171. “Remember,” she says on the way to the white car, “we don’t hug strangers. Even nice ones.” “Why not?” “We just don’t, we save our hugs for people we love.” “I love that boy Walker.” “Jack, you never saw him before in your life.”

— Emma Donoghue

172. “Alice says she can’t explain herself because she’s not herself, she knows who she was this morning but she changed several times since then.”

— Emma Donoghue

173. “Wasn’t it so often the girl – no matter how young – who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?”

— Emma Donoghue

174. “In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change.”

— Emma Donoghue

175. “Why are places to eat called coffee shops?” I ask him. “Well, coffee’s the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car.” Ma only drinks water and milk and juice like me, I wonder what keeps her going. “What do kids have?” “Ah, kids are just full of beans.” Baked beans keep me going all right but green beans are my enemy food.”

— Emma Donoghue

176. “I’ve been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what’s going to hurt.”

— Emma Donoghue

177. “Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music.”

— Emma Donoghue

178. “The lightest touch might keep Mary there, rooted in this frozen alley. Instead, she stretched out her hand to the worn red ribbon in Doll’s wig. Was it the same one, she wondered, the first one, the ribbon the child Mary had set her eyes and heart on at the Seven Dials, three long years ago?”

— Emma Donoghue

179. “Luckily Sumac has extra Rakhi in her pocket and hands them out to anyone who wants one, because really, who cares so long as the threads get tied.”

— Emma Donoghue

180. “Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.”

— Emma Donoghue

181. “Keep your heart infinitesimally small, and sorrow will never spy it...”

— Emma Donoghue

182. “But what on earth had possessed her, to take a wagon this far beyond nowhere? When.”

— Emma Donoghue

183. “It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she’d shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.”

— Emma Donoghue

184. “If I ever got around to loving anyone else, I thought suddenly, it would have to be someone who would neither muffle my thunder nor steal it.”

— Emma Donoghue

185. “One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.”

— Emma Donoghue

186. “Evolution protects those who protect themselves.”

— Emma Donoghue

187. “When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.”

— Emma Donoghue

188. “None of this dirt is yours, I told her. You’re as clean as rain. She kissed me, but on the forehead this time.”

— Emma Donoghue

189. “I seem to have stumbled onto love, like a pothole in the night.”

— Emma Donoghue

190. “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

191. “At any rate, let’s not waste time on ruminations and regrets in the middle of a pandemic.”

— Emma Donoghue

192. “But if there’s no heaven what remains?”

— Emma Donoghue

193. “In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.”

— Emma Donoghue

194. “Dearest Fido! You’re not the stuff of a chapter,” Helen protests. “Several volumes, at least.”

— Emma Donoghue

195. “I heard a knocking in my skull, and kept running to the door, but there was never anyone there.”

— Emma Donoghue

196. “She struggled to think of one day in more than fifteen years of life when instead of drifting along like a leaf on the river she’d simply grabbed what she wanted. The.”

— Emma Donoghue

197. “I’m just preparing the way, just like John the Baptist for Our Lord.”

— Emma Donoghue

198. “From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent. She.”

— Emma Donoghue

199. “They used to draw a skull at the bottom of a tankard, so when you’d drained it you’d be reminded you were going to die someday.”

— Emma Donoghue

200. “But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?”

— Emma Donoghue