Quotes from Emma Donoghue

So much of motherhood is acting.

In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. Short for Davyd, he said pleasantly. The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.

where there's one there's ten.' That's crazy math.

So this was liberty. Mary was beginning to recognise the taste of it in her mouth: terror salting the sweetness.

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.

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

At the balls he took me to there were many beautiful young women who didn't say a word. They answered every question with a shrug or a smile. If champagne got spilt down their dresses they only sighed; when the full moon slid out from behind the castle they watched it in silence. I could not understand it. Had they sold their voices too? Even their bodies were silent, always upright, never loosening their lines. They walked like letters on a page.

The weaklings — ashamed, but grateful — holding out their hands to the flames, their renewed faith glowing inside them. Well, he supposes there are times mercy may do what strictness can't.

I heard a knocking in my skull, and kept running to the door, but there was never anyone there.

What does a promise mean, when it's made to a monster?

Sitting watching Anna's eyelids flicker some hours later, Lib found herself longing for the sleep she should have had that afternoon. But this was an old battle, and like any nurse, she knew she could win if she spoke to herself severely enough. The

The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she'd rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else's whim; her days were spent obeying someone else's rules, working for someone else's profit. Nothing was Mary's anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.

The days of my vanity are over and heaven knows they weren't happy enough to regret

Sometimes love is a pie. There just isn't enough to go around. Or OK, maybe there is enough love, but not enough time and attention, so you have to grab your piece, and then the pie smashes and you're fighting for crumbs...

If I ever got around to loving anyone else, I thought suddenly, it would have to be someone who would neither muffle my thunder nor steal it.

Luckily Sumac has extra Rakhi in her pocket and hands them out to anyone who wants one, because really, who cares so long as the threads get tied.

It seemed to him that there was some urgency in the air, but then he always felt like that in February: a sense of something breaking out through his skin.

Well, as they say, all cats are grey in the dark.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.

Sometimes Artt wishes he'd never set eyes on either of these stupid men; had set out alone in search of his island. Could he have managed the voyage on his own? It might have been better to make the attempt, and die trying.

Jenny wouldn't be dead if she'd never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P'tit wouldn't exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat's cocky smile.

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

It does sometimes seem as if the nineteenth century hasn't reached this part of the world yet." He

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