Top 100 Emma Donoghue Quotes
#2. I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.
Emma Donoghue
#3. I have never been depressed or thrown a plate, which I attribute to the cathartic effects of writing books about people whose lives are more grueling than mine.
Emma Donoghue
#4. Please," he added. "I meant to say, please. I've thought it all through. I've thought of nothing else. I haven't read a book in weeks!
Emma Donoghue
#5. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#6. Ma knows everything except the things she doesn't remember right, or sometimes she says I'm too young for her to explain a thing.
Emma Donoghue
#7. I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person's point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I'm not naturally good at strong plot.
Emma Donoghue
#8. There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.
Emma Donoghue
#9. I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.
Emma Donoghue
#10. Was interesting." "Is that what your ma says to say when you don't like something?" She smiles a bit. "I taught her that." "Is she dying by now?
Emma Donoghue
#11. That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
Emma Donoghue
#12. I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality.
Emma Donoghue
#13. You must have been tortured by the memory of everything Jack didn't even know to want. Friends, school, grass, swimming, rides at the fair ... " "Why does everyone go on about fairs?" Ma's voice is all hoarse. "When I was a kid I hated fairs." The woman does a little laugh. Ma
Emma Donoghue
#14. The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.
Emma Donoghue
#15. You know the way there are two kinds of actors - the De Niro kind who's always De Niro, and then somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms himself eerily? Well, I aim to be the Daniel Day-Lewis kind of writer. I don't have a house style.
Emma Donoghue
#16. I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.
Emma Donoghue
#17. How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized - as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.
Emma Donoghue
#18. I must say, in the case of "Room," both the book and the film, I don't think being a lesbian author held me back at all.
Emma Donoghue
#19. You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
Emma Donoghue
#20. I was tired," she says. "I made a mistake."
"You're not tired anymore?"
She doesn't say anything. Then she says, "I am. But it's OK.
Emma Donoghue
#21. Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman.
Emma Donoghue
#23. The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.
Emma Donoghue
#25. Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.
Emma Donoghue
#26. I don't like a clever toilet looking at our butts.
Emma Donoghue
#27. People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
Emma Donoghue
#28. except one bit about a movie with werewolves and a woman bursting like a balloon is just special effects, that's drawing on computers.
Emma Donoghue
#29. Somewhere between good and bad - bits of both stuck together.
Ma
Emma Donoghue
#30. It was easy to lose a part of your body, it seemed to her; there were so many ways, it was a wonder anybody reached their death intact.
Emma Donoghue
#31. Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
#32. Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine - that was the doctors' domain - but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation.
Emma Donoghue
#33. Now I feel bad I didn't give her the second quarter. Grandma says that's called having a conscience.
Emma Donoghue
#34. Houses are like lots of Rooms stuck together, TV persons stay in them mostly but sometimes they go in their outsides and weather happens to them.
Emma Donoghue
#35. They're her book club but I don't know why because they're not reading books.
Emma Donoghue
#36. 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
#37. No point my telling you he's not worth it, I suppose ... I've seen enough men in my time. Whoever he is, he's not worth what you'll pay.
Emma Donoghue
#38. Who knows what we all are before anything happens?
Emma Donoghue
#40. Good nurses follow rules," Lib growled, "but the best know when to break them.
Emma Donoghue
#41. That night my new skin was red silk, shivering in the breeze.
Emma Donoghue
#42. I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.
Emma Donoghue
#43. Actually, Saint Peter was in jail, one time
"
I laugh. "Babies don't go in jail."
"This happened when they were all grown up."
I didn't know Baby Jesus grows up.
Emma Donoghue
#44. Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.
Emma Donoghue
#45. Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.
Emma Donoghue
#46. It's painful to consider anything but writing.
Emma Donoghue
#47. Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.
Emma Donoghue
#48. 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
#49. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre, meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.
Emma Donoghue
#50. And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.
Emma Donoghue
#51. Every parent has those moments where they look at their child and think, 'There's a demon in those eyes and no one can see it but me!'
Emma Donoghue
#52. If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.
Emma Donoghue
#53. ... where there's one there's ten.'
That's crazy math.
Emma Donoghue
#54. I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.
Emma Donoghue
#55. Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.
Emma Donoghue
#56. When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.
Emma Donoghue
#57. I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.
Emma Donoghue
#58. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.
Emma Donoghue
#59. Hmm? No, it's a photo of all these streets. The camera's way up in space." "Outer Space?" "Yeah." "Cool." Officer Oh's voice gets all excited. "Three four nine Washington, shed in the rear, lit skylight . . . Got to be.
Emma Donoghue
#60. The hammock hangs on hooks in two trees at the very back of the yard, one is a shortish tree that's only twice my tall and bent over, one is a million times high with silvery leaves.
Emma Donoghue
#61. I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.
Emma Donoghue
#62. Unknown Assassin, says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre to see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the army at Little Bighorn.
Emma Donoghue
#63. She gets sick of things fast, it's from being an adult.
Emma Donoghue
#64. The human mind needs boundaries. Without them it would fall in on itself, like a crushed honeycomb.
Emma Donoghue
#65. Real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.
Emma Donoghue
#66. I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.
Emma Donoghue
#67. So then she took me home, or I took her home, or we were both somehow taken to the closest thing.
Emma Donoghue
#68. I looked in my mirror and saw, not myself, but every place I'd never been.
Emma Donoghue
#69. But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement - did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells?
Emma Donoghue
#70. It's all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can't go there because we don't know the secret code, but it's real all the same.
Before I didn't know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.
Emma Donoghue
#71. So this was liberty. Mary was beginning to recognise the taste of it in her mouth: terror salting the sweetness.
Emma Donoghue
#72. When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.
Emma Donoghue
#73. We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism." He
Emma Donoghue
#74. Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.
Emma Donoghue
#75. Ambition was an itch in Mary's show, a maggot in her guts.
Emma Donoghue
#76. 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
#77. Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.
Emma Donoghue
#78. Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"
Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?"
"Like what things?"
"Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.
Emma Donoghue
#79. She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.
Emma Donoghue
#80. 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
#81. I watch his hands, they're lumpy but clever. "Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"
Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?
Emma Donoghue
#82. Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.
Emma Donoghue
#83. I'm constantly saying, 'I read a fascinating article in 'The New Yorker' ... ' I say it so often that sometimes I think I have nothing interesting to say myself, I merely regurgitate 'The New Yorker.'
Emma Donoghue
#84. But for me, Room is a peculiar (and no doubt heretical) battle between Mary and the Devil for young Jesus. If God sounds absent from that triangle, that's because I think that for a small child, God's love is represented, and proved, by mother-love.
Emma Donoghue
#86. Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
Emma Donoghue
#87. [She] was easy to enjoy but hard to know."
...
"It's unbearable, the not knowing.
Emma Donoghue
#89. For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.
Emma Donoghue
#90. Driving home I see the playground but it's all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side. "Oh, Jack, that's a different one," says Grandma. There's playgrounds in every town." Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.
Emma Donoghue
#91. I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.
Emma Donoghue
#92. taking the killers, always two at night because she says pain is like water, it spreads out as soon as she lies down. She
Emma Donoghue
#93. She was with Jude so rarely that when she was, every cell of her body rang with grateful knowledge of it.
Emma Donoghue
#94. 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
#95. Once I spent a whole day there, a blade of grass in each hand to anchor me to the warm earth.
I watched the sun rise, pass over my head and set. Ladybirds mated on my knuckle; a shrew nibbled a hole in my stocking while I tried not to laugh. Such a day was worth any punishment.
Emma Donoghue
#96. 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
#98. Scared is what you're feeling," says Ma, "but brave is what you're doing." "Huh?" "Scaredybrave.
Emma Donoghue
#100. And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.
Emma Donoghue
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