Quotes from Emma Donoghue

Freedom from versus freedom to.

To wÅ'aÅ›nie znaczy sÅ'owo influenza, inna nazwa grypy. Influenza delle stelle, czyli wpÅ'yw gwiazd. Dla Å›redniowiecznych WÅ'ochów ta choroba byÅ'a dowodem na to, ?e niebiosa sterujÄ… ich losem, ?e niektórzy dosÅ'ownie urodzili siÄ™ pod zÅ'Ä… gwiazdÄ….

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

pain is like water, it spreads out as soon as she lies down.

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

CLOSED FOR FORESEEABLE FUTURE BY ORDER OF BOARD OF HEALTH. I thought of the young Noonans; if slum children weren't going to school these days, they couldn't be getting their free dinners there.

What's wrong with you, girl, that you would make yourself over again?

That silence you heard, when you tried to pray — that's the sound of God listening.

From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent. She

A door must be open or shut... You can't have it both ways.

Over a lifetime you packed your brain tight with data, like an overstuffed suitcase, only for it all to fall out in the end.

One couldn't pick whom to love, thought Anne, The woman beside her was friend and sister and lover and many things besides. One could only hope to recognise love where it grew, and get a grip on it and hold on.

of the emperor whose gorgeous clockwork bird had seized up in the end; on his deathbed he'd called for the dark-feathered nightingale, knowing he never should have chosen a shiny substitute, because nothing but her real song could save him now. Was there any music that would bring back memories once they were lost in the fog? What were we, once our stories had drifted off like smoke?

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

My job wasn't to cure all Ita Noonan's ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.

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

But to sever all your connections, professional as well as personal... Lib fumbled for words. Wouldn't it be like a little death? Byrne nodded. I believe emigration generally is that. The price of a new life.

All this reverential—I'm not a saint." Ma's voice is getting loud again. "I wish people would stop treating us like we're the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I've been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn't believe.

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

Kartais mokytojai išmoko daugiau, negu patys supranta.

They used to draw a skull at the bottom of a tankard, so when you'd drained it you'd be reminded you were going to die someday.

It was only a path through the woods, I told myself. Tangled and faint and looping but a path just the same, and didn't every path have an end?

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

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.