Emma Donoghue Quotes

I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.

I'd love to watch TV all the time, but it rots our brains. Before I came down from Heaven Ma left it on all day long and got turned into a zombie that's like a ghost but walks 'thump thump.' So now she always switches off after one show, then the cells multiply again in the day and we can watch another show after dinner and grow more brains in our sleep.

We spend most of our lives holding on to objects, he thought, and finally they fall from our cold dead hands and those who tidy up after us have the worry of what to do with all this stuff.

Everyone's got a different story.

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

Your body - every body is a marvel. A wonder of creation. [...] The day your first opened your eyes, Anna, God asked just one thing: that you live.

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.

If he guessed his mistake, if he wanted me back, I thought, let him suffer and work for it as I had worked and suffered. Let him follow me over a mountain of iron and a lake of glass, and wear out three swords in my defense. But at my truest, lying awake trying to count the stars, I knew my prince would not follow. In my mind's eye I saw him in his palace, stroking the gold and silver and starry dresses which were fading now like leaves in winter, weeping for a spotless princess who did not exist, who had drowned in the river of time.

Sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.

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.'

Seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write [a novel]ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations.

You know, plenty of people headed off to Canada or America on the basis of government information, propaganda campaigns. Often you'd go off with a brochure in hand and you'd turn up and it wouldn't be like that at all.

I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and [ the book] ROOM was the result.

The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.

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

People are locked up in all sorts of ways.

I thought one way to try to hold on to the power was to write the script myself. That way, I could say to filmmakers, "I'm not asking you to hire me unseen. I'm just saying, 'Here's my script. Can we work together?'" So that worked out well.

She's asleep, she can´t be mad in her sleep, can she?

I think the only difference between me and other people is that when I hear of an interesting historical incident, I immediately write it down and Google it.

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?

Why are places to eat called coffee shops?" I ask him. "Well, coffee's the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car." Ma only drinks water and milk and juice like me, I wonder what keeps her going. "What do kids have?" "Ah, kids are just full of beans." Baked beans keep me going all right but green beans are my enemy food.

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

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.

A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.

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

Little by little; the way out of the mine was as long as the way in.

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

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.

How odd; wedded for life, because one of us had died.

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.

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.

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.

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic, but to find a cinematic equivalent.

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

Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib's experience, those who wouldn't cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they'd entered and what they'd done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives' smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.

Now that I've got a way in [to the industry] - because it can feel a bit like, "How can I possibly write a film?" - but now that I've got at least some experience in the film world, I'd absolutely love to do it again.

On the whole I am inclined to think that a witch should not kiss. Perhaps it is the not being kissed that makes her a witch; perhaps the source of her power is the breath of loneliness around her.

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.

All the women I knew carried some kind of blade, though they were not all metal, or even visible. Whether something had happened to them, or whether they had only anticipated it, it kept them awake the occasional night

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.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere ...

Any parent knows how to be the ideal parent.

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.

The watch has altered the situation that's being watched.

So when one spring in spite of all this good advice I fell in love, it felt like disaster. I took a tiny bite and it exploded in my stomach. Love splashed through every cranny, hauled on every muscle, unlocked every joint. I was so full of astonishment, I felt ten feet tall. My shoulders itched as if wings might break through.

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

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

I'm just preparing the way, just like John the Baptist for Our Lord.

Better to drown in the surf than stand idly by the shore.

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.

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

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.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.

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.

The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

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.

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

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

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.

If the potato blight had been such a long catastrophe, ending only seven years ago, it occurred to Lib that a child now eleven must have been born into hunger. Weaned on it, reared on it; that had to shape a person. Every thrifty inch of Anna's body had learned to make do with less. She's never been greedy or clamoured for treats - that was how Rosaleen O'Donnell had praised her daughter. Anna must have been petted every time she said she'd had plenty. Earned a smile for every morsel she passed on to her brother or the maid.

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

It stands to reason that those who assault nature will suffer at her hands in the end.

Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.

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

I chop the broccoli into pieces with ZigZag Knife, sometimes I swallow some when Ma's not looking and she says, "Oh, no, where's that big bit gone?" but she's not really mad because raw things make us extra alive.

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

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 think I read Susan Brownmiller's classic book called "Femininity" when I was about 16. So yeah, it's been part of my mindset since a very early age. To me, what's crucial is to tell women's stories but also to tell them in a way that is fearless.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

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

Colleen; that was what the Irish seemed to call every young female

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Their next reunion shifted like an oasis on the horizon, and Jude couldn't plot her course. She trudged through her days, haunted by the feeling that real life was happening five thousand kilometers away.

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.

Now I feel bad I didn't give her the second quarter. Grandma says that's called having a conscience.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.

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.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

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

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!'

(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

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

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?

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

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