Top 280 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations. As.”

— Emma Donoghue

252. “The grave is open and the dead friendship walks.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

254. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

256. “In my experience of ward nursing, two shifts are more conducive to sleep than three.” “But.”

— Emma Donoghue

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

260. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

266. “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

267. “Learn even from enemies.”

— Emma Donoghue

268. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

274. “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

275. “These inexperienced doctors rarely knew one end of a woman from the other.”

— Emma Donoghue

276. “Well, he need be nobody’s Prior anymore. His bonds are broken. No more obligation to teach, guide, direct, and chasten. No human babble to clog up his ears. Artt has this whole island to himself and it’s his alone. The steep land will be his pristine page and he’ll write on it with every step, every prayer, every breath. A bastion of faith, a sentry post where he will man the outer frontier of Christendom: oh, such a place it’ll be now! No one and nothing to bar his way to heaven.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

280. “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

281. “Well so long as you’re awake, does it matter how you were woken?”

— Emma Donoghue