Top 100 Emma Donoghue Quotes
#1. Although I was always a keen library user, buying books was a different order of bliss, because I would get to live with these ones.
(A Chat with Emma Donoghue)
Jen Campbell
#2. Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.
Emma Donoghue
#4. I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.
Emma Donoghue
#5. I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
Emma Donoghue
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.
Emma Donoghue
#10. Me and Ma have a deal, we're going to try everything one time so we know what we like.
Emma Donoghue
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Under the thousand crystal candelabras I danced with ten elderly gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only, Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so?
Emma Donoghue
#14. If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.
Emma Donoghue
#15. We used to call it her Cinderella complex, because often when she had agreed to go out in the evening she would be seized by panic and announce that she had nothing to wear.
Emma Donoghue
#16. A strident female voice causes men's ears to close.
Emma Donoghue
#17. Really, a novel does not exist, does not happen, until readers pour their own lives into it. If
Emma Donoghue
#18. Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet.
Emma Donoghue
#19. 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
#20. I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.
Emma Donoghue
#21. I guess the feminism in "Room" springs to mind most.
Emma Donoghue
#22. She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.
Emma Donoghue
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres.
Emma Donoghue
#26. I remember a period where my publisher said to me, 'Look, your historical work is selling much better than your contemporary work, so please give us more historicals.'
Emma Donoghue
#27. 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
#28. I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.
Emma Donoghue
#29. 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
#30. The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.
Emma Donoghue
#31. If you're sorry, folks can tell. No use piling on the verbiage.
Emma Donoghue
#32. 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
#33. In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.
Emma Donoghue
#34. And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.
Emma Donoghue
#35. Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.
Emma Donoghue
#36. With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.
Emma Donoghue
#37. 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
#38. I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.
Emma Donoghue
#39. When Jack just rescued her Ma's, just succeeded doing the Great Escape:
"Want to go to Bed."
"They'll find us somewhere to sleep in a little while."
"No. Bed."
"You mean in Room?" Ma's pulled back, she's staring in my eyes.
"Yeah. I've seen the world and I'm tired now.
Emma Donoghue
#40. 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
#41. Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.
Emma Donoghue
#42. By her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; 'circle' sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.
Emma Donoghue
#43. 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
#45. That's tree persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it's nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They're all saying till I hurt. Stop all saying at the same time.
Emma Donoghue
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman.
Emma Donoghue
#50. Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it's ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?
Emma Donoghue
#51. In my experience of ward nursing, two shifts are more conducive to sleep than three." "But
Emma Donoghue
#53. It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers.
Emma Donoghue
#54. The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.
Emma Donoghue
#55. I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless.
Emma Donoghue
#57. 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
#58. A lady lion-tamer put her head in a lion's mouth last week, and he bit it off. If a lion attempted to put his head in my mouth I expect I would do the same.
Emma Donoghue
#59. I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.
Emma Donoghue
#60. People have no idea of the things that don't happen to them - the lives they're not living, the deaths stalking them - and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all the hovering possibilities, like insects thickening the air.
Emma Donoghue
#61. Well, they don't make their music just to pass the time," says Jenny, grinning. "Got to want something to sing about it, no?
Emma Donoghue
#62. I don't like a clever toilet looking at our butts.
Emma Donoghue
#63. People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
Emma Donoghue
#64. (Really, thought Lib, who ever died exultingly? Whatever fool penned that phrase had never sat by a bed with his ears pricked for the last rasp.) Aged
Emma Donoghue
#65. She feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that's mixed with piss and can't be separated from it.
Emma Donoghue
#66. I think the sea's just rain and salt."
"Ever taste a tear?" asks Grandma.
"Yeah."
"Well, that's the same as the sea."
I still don't want to walk in it if it's tears.
Emma Donoghue
#67. I got in the habit of giving away a book as soon as I've finished it because I lived in a housing co-op at Cambridge and had no space to keep books.
Emma Donoghue
#68. But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he's gone out. "Keep it," say Steppa. "But what about when he comes home?
Emma Donoghue
#69. I wrote the novel [Room], and then I thought, "This could work on film, and I want to be the one to do it." So I went ahead and drafted it.
Emma Donoghue
#70. It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.
Emma Donoghue
#71. Sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.
Emma Donoghue
#72. I've been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what's going to hurt.
Emma Donoghue
#73. 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
#74. It stands to reason that those who assault nature will suffer at her hands in the end.
Emma Donoghue
#75. Perhaps there is no providence, no fate, no grand plan, she thinks now. Perhaps we dig our own traps and lie down in them.
Emma Donoghue
#76. Somewhere between good and bad - bits of both stuck together.
Ma
Emma Donoghue
#77. 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
#78. Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
#79. What's crucial about being an executive producer is that you stay in the loop, information-wise. They have to share all their major decisions with you.
Emma Donoghue
#80. There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.
Emma Donoghue
#81. 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
#82. Now I feel bad I didn't give her the second quarter. Grandma says that's called having a conscience.
Emma Donoghue
#84. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything
Emma Donoghue
#85. Swiping's bad but if I was a swiper I'd swipe good stuff like cars and chocolates.
Emma Donoghue
#86. One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.
Emma Donoghue
#87. It's called mind over matter. If we don't mind, it doesn't matter.
Emma Donoghue
#88. In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn't want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.
Emma Donoghue
#89. 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
#90. I tell you frankly, Mrs. Damer, the more I see of different nations, the less sure I feel about the pre-eminence of my own.
Emma Donoghue
#91. I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
Emma Donoghue
#92. The Times had announced that seven thousand pounds had been raised to send a party of Englishwomen to the Crimea as nurses. That, Lib had thought, with dread but also a sense of daring, I believe I could do that. She'd lost so much already, she was reckless. All
Emma Donoghue
#93. I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
Emma Donoghue
#94. They're her book club but I don't know why because they're not reading books.
Emma Donoghue
#95. Is there a sense in which you miss being behind a locked door?" Ma turns to Morris. "Is she allowed to ask me such stupid questions?" The
Emma Donoghue
#96. I've always been religiously inclined, but it doesn't come up in most of my books.
Emma Donoghue
#97. Maybe I'm a human, but I'm a me-and-Ma as well.
Emma Donoghue
#98. I think ultimately the film 'Room' is a kind of hymn to motherhood and to the everyday heroism of parents who find their smiles in terrible times.
Emma Donoghue
#99. 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
#100. Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you."
I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.
Emma Donoghue
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