Emma Donoghue quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Emma Donoghue on Wise Famous Quotes.

People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.

I pray for John the Baptist and Baby Jesus to come around for a playdate with Dora and Boots.

I've been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what's going to hurt.

Really, a novel does not exist, does not happen, until readers pour their own lives into it. If

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.

thinks now. And sometimes, Little One. It's quite mysterious to

Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [ the book]ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.

I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.

Good nurses follow rules," Lib growled, "but the best know when to break them.

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.

Ambition was an itch in Mary's show, a maggot in her guts.

I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

She gets sick of things fast, it's from being an adult.

Stories are a different kind of true.

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.

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!'

People are locked up in all sorts of ways.

I've seen the world and I'm tired now.

I read three books a week.

Perhaps we get, not what we deserve, but what we demand.

The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations. As

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

There's not a thing wrong with you, you're right the whole way through.

Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman.

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.

His plastic hand is up and he's waggling his fingers, I pretend I don't see. I'm not going to give him my fingers, I need them for me.

My names were hand-me-downs too: girl, the creature, or, most often, you there.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

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.

Me and Ma have a deal, we're going to try everything one time so we know what we like.

Well, they don't make their music just to pass the time," says Jenny, grinning. "Got to want something to sing about it, no?

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.

Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism." He

But no, I used all my brave up.

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

[ ... ] You're not afraid of monsters, are you?
It depends on the monster, if it's a real one or not and if it's where I am.

Ma's in Room still, I want her here so much much much.

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.

Somewhere between good and bad - bits of both stuck together.
Ma

I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.

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.

Scared is what you're feeling," says Ma, "but brave is what you're doing." "Huh?" "Scaredybrave.

Don't worry about it. She keeps saying that but I don't know to not worry. I

except one bit about a movie with werewolves and a woman bursting like a balloon is just special effects, that's drawing on computers.

...everyone goes home in the end.

[She] was easy to enjoy but hard to know."
...
"It's unbearable, the not knowing.

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.

I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.

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?

Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.

I'll be in Heaven getting your room ready.

When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.

Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.

One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.

I'm finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.

I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga.

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.

No, I mean everything feels different, but it's because I'm different.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

I think buddy is man talk for sweetie.

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

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?

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

taking the killers, always two at night because she says pain is like water, it spreads out as soon as she lies down. She

Everyone's got a different story.

When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything

But what on earth had possessed her, to take a wagon this far beyond nowhere? When

I guess the feminism in "Room" springs to mind most.

She was with Jude so rarely that when she was, every cell of her body rang with grateful knowledge of it.

In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.

Nowadays 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.

So then she took me home, or I took her home, or we were both somehow taken to the closest thing.

In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary.

Who knows what we all are before anything happens?

If you're sorry, folks can tell. No use piling on the verbiage.

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.

I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?

You know who you belong to, Jack?"
"Yeah."
"Yourself."
He's wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.

It's called mind over matter. If we don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.

Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music.

Maybe I'm a human, but I'm a me-and-Ma as well.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

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.

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.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

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.

Alice says she can't explain herself because she's not herself, she knows who she was this morning but she changed several times since then.

Perhaps there is no providence, no fate, no grand plan, she thinks now. Perhaps we dig our own traps and lie down in them.

I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.