Quotes from Emma Donoghue

I was beautiful, or so my father told me. My oval mirror showed me a face with nothing written on it. I had suitors aplenty but wanted none of them: their doggish devotion seemed too easily won. I had an appetite for magic, even then. I wanted something improbably and perfect as a red rose just opening.

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?

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

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

Who knows what we all are before anything happens?

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.

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

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

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.

coffee's the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car.

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

Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

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

COVER UP EACH COUGH OR SNEEZE…FOOLS AND TRAITORS SPREAD DISEASE.

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

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

Only for the duration, of course, for the foreseeable future, as the posters said. Though I was having trouble foreseeing any future. How would we ever get back to normal after the pandemic

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...

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.

And why must it always be presumed that a woman's views are based on personal considerations?

May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage.

I'll be in Heaven getting your room ready.

It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers. Also when I tell her what I'm thinking and she tells me what she's thinking, our each ideas jump into our other's head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.