Quotes from Emma Donoghue

Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that's the sound of God listening.

That's what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.

She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.

That night my new skin was red silk, shivering in the breeze.

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.

It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.

To travel is to turn the pages of the great book of life.

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.

That's tree persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it's nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They're all saying till I hurt. Stop all saying at the same time.

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?

Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music.

But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he's gone out. Keep it, say Steppa. But what about when he comes home?

I'd never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.

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.

Alice says she can't explain herself because she's not herself, she knows who she was this morning but she changed several times since then.

Guilt was the sooty air we breathed these days.

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.

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

Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.

We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism.

looked up and found the Great Bear. I told her, In Italy, they used to blame the influence of the constellations for making them sick—that's where influenza comes from. Bridie took that notion in stride. As if, when it's your time, your star gives you a yank—

Fate was faceless, life arbitrary, a tale told by an idiot.

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.

But for me, Room is a peculiar (and no doubt heretical) battle between Mary and the Devil for young Jesus. If God sounds absent from that triangle, that's because I think that for a small child, God's love is represented, and proved, by mother-love.