Top 280 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

216. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “One couldn’t pick whom to love, thought Anne, The woman beside her was friend and sister and lover and many things besides. One could only hope to recognise love where it grew, and get a grip on it and hold on.”

— Emma Donoghue

222. “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

223. “The human mind needs boundaries. Without them it would fall in on itself, like a crushed honeycomb.”

— Emma Donoghue

224. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

227. “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

228. “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

229. “Freedom from versus freedom to.”

— Emma Donoghue

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher’s decision to play down the danger or if he’d received orders from above.”

— Emma Donoghue

234. “What’s wrong with you, girl, that you would make yourself over again?”

— Emma Donoghue

235. “The truth was quicker than a lie, so I told it.”

— Emma Donoghue

236. “Our flesh keeps our memories,” Charles-Louis Philippe wrote in Bubu de Montparnasse, his 1901 tale of street life; “we travel through the present with all our baggage.”

— Emma Donoghue

237. “All this reverential – I’m not a saint.” Ma’s voice is getting loud again. “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I’ve been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn’t believe.”

— Emma Donoghue

238. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

240. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

242. “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

243. “A Nightingale!” he marvelled. Ah, so Matron had told him that much. Lib was always shy of introducing the great lady’s name into conversation and loathed the whimsical title that had come to be attached to all those Miss N. had trained, as if they were dolls cast in her heroic mould. “Yes, I had the honour of serving under her at Scutari.” “Noble labour.” It.”

— Emma Donoghue

244. “Learn even from enemies.”

— Emma Donoghue

245. “So. In open ocean, drifting blind now, and with no way to stop moving through the dark. It is Artt who’s brought them to this extremity, and it’s too late for doubt. ‘Never mind. We won’t founder,’ he assures them. ‘We travel in the palm of God’s hand.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

247. “A secret of mothers: We enjoy it when our offspring are under the weather because it draws them back to us again, reverses time a bit, spins the hands anticlockwise. For a little while they need us as they once did every minute of the day, and we surrender reminiscently to that sweet rush.”

— Emma Donoghue

248. “Would have pleased. Such convoluted grammar death required: what tense to describe the hypothetical emotions of a woman who didn’t exist anymore?”

— Emma Donoghue

249. “I told her, In Italy, they used to blame the influence of the constellations for making them sick – that’s where influenza comes from.”

— Emma Donoghue

250. “He’s altered, he knows; he’s brewing an infection of the spirit. These days, when he goes poking around the Plateau in search of anything remotely edible – the last of the bitter spoonwort, campion, dock, stonecrop, spurrey, tree mallow, even flakes of orange lichen, in hopes their colour might carry some vigour – in the back of his mind, Cormac is picking a fight. As he and the Prior keep adding to the walls of the chapel – almost roof-height now – his fury rises too.”

— Emma Donoghue