Quotes from Emma Donoghue

I thought humans were or weren't, I didn't know someone could be a bit human. Then what are his other bits?

Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.

If Earth was such unworthy soil for God's best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there?

Jack. He'd never give us a phone, or a window. Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.

Jenny was easy to enjoy but hard to know.

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.

Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.

I was tired," she says. "I made a mistake." "You're not tired anymore?" She doesn't say anything. Then she says, "I am. But it's OK.

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.

I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?

One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me 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.

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.

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.

Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.

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.

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true.

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

Well, they don't make their music just to pass the time," says Jenny, grinning. "Got to want something to sing about it, no?

She] was easy to enjoy but hard to know." ... "It's unbearable, the not knowing.

Actually, Saint Peter was in jail, one time -- I laugh. Babies don't go in jail. This happened when they were all grown up. I didn't know Baby Jesus grows up.

The whole point of travel is to learn there's no such thing as normal.

It was like wanting ice cream instead of meat loaf, and being told that children in refugee camps would be grateful for the meat loaf. Yes, of course she had nothing to complain about, compared to so many people, but when had that ever stopped anyone from complaining? Happiness was a balloon that always hovered just out of arm's reach.

You and I are lucky, Nurse Power. I frowned. Lucky? To be alive and well, you mean? To be here, in the middle of this. We'll never learn more or faster.