Emma Donoghue Quotes - Page 5

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.

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.

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 let's you get on with it.

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

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room." Ma says it but on mute. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

...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.

People are locked up in all sorts of ways.

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.

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.

You know who you belong to Jack? - Yeah. Yourself. - He's wrong, actually, I belong to Ma. p. 261 Room by E Donoghue

Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet.

We're standing on the deck that's all wooden like the deck of a ship. There's fuzz on it, little bundles. Grandma says it's some kind of pollen from a tree. "Which one?" I'm staring up at all the differents. "Can't help you there, I'm afraid." In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there's so much, persons don't even know the names.

The way to my heart is through Belgian milk chocolate.

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.

I read three books a week.

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

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

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.

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.