Top 280 Emma Donoghue Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Was genius a weed that sprang up anywhere, or did it need a particular habitat?”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

253. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

257. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

259. “Sometimes Artt wishes he’d never set eyes on either of these stupid men; had set out alone in search of his island. Could he have managed the voyage on his own? It might have been better to make the attempt, and die trying.”

— Emma Donoghue

260. “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

261. “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

262. “My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.”

— Emma Donoghue

263. “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

264. “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

265. “Jenny was easy to enjoy but hard to know.”

— Emma Donoghue

266. “How could anyone bear to be a parent? Like contracting to love a werewolf.”

— Emma Donoghue

267. “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

268. “Neither of us mentioned the kissing, so as not to burst the bubble by touching it. So as not to think about what it meant for the two of us to kiss.”

— Emma Donoghue

269. “Human beings have invented so many new sources of pain.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

271. “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

272. “Trust me, the island must have water, since we need it to live. This place was set aside for us when the earth was made.”

— Emma Donoghue

273. “The line I found most laughable was the one about lying down for a fortnight; who could afford or manage that without a houseful of servants?”

— Emma Donoghue

274. “To travel is to turn the pages of the great book of life.”

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue

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

— Emma Donoghue