Top 250 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “All rather humbling, she added ruefully. Here we are in the golden age of medicine – making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria – and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow.”

— Emma Donoghue

202. “When I was four I didn’t know about the world, or I thought it was only stories. Then Ma told me about it for real and I thought I knowed everything. But now I’m in the world all the time, I actually don’t know much, I’m always confused.”

— Emma Donoghue

203. “Ventilation and sanitation will be our nation’s salvation.”

— Emma Donoghue

204. “She murmured, We could always blame the stars. I beg your pardon, Doctor? That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed. I pictured that, the celestial bodies trying to fly us like upsidedown kites. Or perhaps just yanking on us for their obscure amusement.”

— Emma Donoghue

205. “Look around you, Mr. Groyne. This is where every nation draws its first breath. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.”

— Emma Donoghue

206. “Swiping’s bad but if I was a swiper I’d swipe good stuff like cars and chocolates.”

— Emma Donoghue

207. “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.”

— Emma Donoghue

208. “I didn’t forget a day of you either.”

— Emma Donoghue

209. “That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.”

— Emma Donoghue

210. “I was taught that being a good nurse means knowing when to call a doctor.”

— Emma Donoghue

211. “I will not feed my soul with sorrow.”

— Emma Donoghue

212. “Every symptom is a word in the language of disease, but sometimes we can’t hear them properly. And even if we do, we can’t always make out the full sentence... So we just shush them, one word at a time.”

— Emma Donoghue

213. “Freedom from versus freedom to.”

— Emma Donoghue

214. “I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.”

— Emma Donoghue

215. “Here we are in the golden age of medicine – making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria – and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow. No, you’re the ones who matter right now. Attentive nurses, I mean – tender loving care, that seems to be all that’s saving lives.”

— Emma Donoghue

216. “I didn’t know I was swearing fealty to a lunatic.’ For a moment Artt can’t catch his breath. ‘I see now you won’t rest till you’ve made this island a hell on earth,’ Cormac says. ‘I release myself from my vows.”

— Emma Donoghue

217. “I did realise that this job was too grim for most people, all the stinking and leaking and dying. Mine was a peculiar vocation.”

— Emma Donoghue

218. “The weaklings – ashamed, but grateful – holding out their hands to the flames, their renewed faith glowing inside them. Well, he supposes there are times mercy may do what strictness can’t.”

— Emma Donoghue

219. “Brother, there’s no end to your knowledge.’ ‘I’m just old,’ Cormac says with a chuckle.”

— Emma Donoghue

220. “And one of these days, even this flu will have run its course. Really? Mary O’Rahilly asked. How can you be sure? 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

221. “When I was as young as you are now I learned how to save my own life.”

— Emma Donoghue

222. “It was only a path through the woods, I told myself. Tangled and faint and looping but a path just the same, and didn’t every path have an end?”

— Emma Donoghue

223. “Fog makes an island of every man.”

— Emma Donoghue

224. “How illimitable is the gullibility of mankind, especially, it must be said, when combined with provincial ignorance. But Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; that is to say, “If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” Thus quoth Petronius, in the days of Our Lord, an aphorism just as pertinent to our own time.”

— Emma Donoghue

225. “It was as if I had spent thirteen years specialising in a certain language, only to discover all its speakers had scattered and renounced their native tongue. No, worse than that, because at least dead languages could be studied. This was as if I had spent my life learning to play a certain unique instrument, only to see some crazed vandal smash it to pieces.”

— Emma Donoghue

226. “In her absence I cleaned the dead woman, working gently, as if Ita Noonan could still feel everything.”

— Emma Donoghue

227. “Trian’s so close now, within arm’s reach of the hatchet. He could snatch it up in half a second. The Prior’s face is shining like an angel’s. Trian shuts his eyes and drops to his knees. But still he sees that triumphant smile, and still he wants to kill the man. He hits his own chest so hard he winds himself. To long to do murder, to savour it in your heart, that’s nearly as bad as to do it. Trian’s in mortal sin and he can’t escape. He batters himself again and again.”

— Emma Donoghue

228. “And how will we recognise our island?’ Trian wonders. ‘By a sign of some kind.’ Cormac realises something: the Prior doesn’t know. Trian hesitates as if about to say more, but doesn’t. It comes to Cormac that maybe it’s their fault the boat hasn’t reached the island yet, his and Trian’s. We of little faith.”

— Emma Donoghue

229. “I tried to remember what it was the old ones used to sprinkle on us children at Halloween in the part of the country where Tim and I had grown up.”

— Emma Donoghue

230. “Is that from the thing you were telling me – red, brown, blue, black?”

— Emma Donoghue

231. “A door must be open or shut... You can’t have it both ways.”

— Emma Donoghue

232. “The thing is to take your life in your hands.”

— Emma Donoghue

233. “The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War – an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.”

— Emma Donoghue

234. “Maybe history really boiled down to how the hell did we happen to happen?”

— Emma Donoghue

235. “Life is the weightiest of gifts, and there’s no giving it back till the end.”

— Emma Donoghue

236. “I looked at my stepmother, and she stared back at me, and our eyes were like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections, infinitely hollow.”

— Emma Donoghue

237. “I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.”

— Emma Donoghue

238. “You can’t be a little bit dead. If you’re not in the ground yet, you’re one hundred per cent alive.”

— Emma Donoghue

239. “Our faith stands like an island,’ he proclaims, ’lashed by a sea of doubt.”

— Emma Donoghue

240. “After a while the first lights stand out in the sky. Trian asks, ‘Are they holes, the stars?’ ‘Bodies of cold fire,’ Artt corrects him, ‘fixed in a sphere around the earth. God spins it westwards every day. That’s what makes the air and the clouds move.’ He cranes up, a little dizzy, imagining that giant hand flicking the globe.”

— Emma Donoghue

241. “Thinking that maybe we were indeed the sport of the stars. With their invisible silks, they tugged us this way and that.”

— Emma Donoghue

242. “So instead of poverty, I’d write malnourishment or debility. As code for too many pregnancies, I might put anaemia, heart strain, bad back, brittle bones, varicose veins, low spirits, incontinence, fistula, torn cervix, or uterine prolapse. There was a saying I’d heard from several patients that struck a chill into my bones: She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve.”

— Emma Donoghue

243. “Over a lifetime you packed your brain tight with data, like an overstuffed suitcase, only for it all to fall out in the end.”

— Emma Donoghue

244. “My eyes dawdled across the missalette. I had never noticed before that the official title of the ‘Lord have mercy’ prayer was the gracious phrase ‘Invitation to Sorrow’. Hey there, Sorrow, how’ve you been keeping? Come on in. If your bike doesn’t have lights you can always crash on our sofa tonight. Oh, so you’ll be staying a while, Sorrow? Planning to get to know me better? Grand, so. There’s tea in the pot. All.”

— Emma Donoghue

245. “How to explain hypertension to a woman with no more than a ladylike education?”

— Emma Donoghue

246. “Well, as they say, all cats are grey in the dark.”

— Emma Donoghue

247. “The old world was changed utterly, dying on its feet, and a new one was struggling to be born.”

— Emma Donoghue

248. “Blame the germs, the unburied corpses, the dust of war, the random circulation of wind and weather, the Lord God Almighty. Blame the stars. Just don’t blame the dead, because none of them wished this on themselves.”

— Emma Donoghue

249. “Was genius a weed that sprang up anywhere, or did it need a particular habitat?”

— Emma Donoghue

250. “Then she lifted the breastbone and frontal ribs in one go, the raising of a portcullis. That made me tremble. How frail my own rib cage; how breakable we all were.”

— Emma Donoghue