Quotes from Emma Donoghue

How odd; wedded for life, because one of us had died.

Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars.

No sabía que las cosas pudieran estar vivas a medias. Aunque tampoco sabía que los retratos tuvieran vida dentro.

Under the thousand crystal candelabras I danced with ten elderly gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only, Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so?

My names were hand-me-downs too: girl, the creature, or, most often, you there.

Better to drown in the surf than stand idly by the shore.

All I think when I look at you is hallelujah

But if there's no heaven what remains?

Driving home I see the playground but it's all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side. Oh, Jack, that's a different one, says Grandma. There's playgrounds in every town. Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.

it was always that way with the dead; they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions. All we could do was remember them, as much as we could remember them, whether it was accurate or not.

Grandma says there's more of him. What? Persons like him, in the world. Ah, says Ma. Is it true? Yeah. But the tricky thing is, there's far more people in the middle. Where? Ma's staring out the window but I don't know at what. Somewhere between good and bad, she says. Bits of both stuck together.

But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?

So they're fake? No, no. Stories are a different kind of true. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

Sinn Féiners? (The Gaelic phrase meant us-aloners. They went around ranting that home rule wouldn't be enough now; nothing would content them but a breakaway republic.)

Dearest Fido! You're not the stuff of a chapter," Helen protests. "Several volumes, at least.

Life is the weightiest of gifts, and there's no giving it back till the end.

She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.

She struggled to think of one day in more than fifteen years of life when instead of drifting along like a leaf on the river she'd simply grabbed what she wanted. The

Las personas se mueven tanto por el mundo que constantemente se pierden cosas

What this good man had sworn to protect me from was not the same as what I feared. I trusted that he would never let anything hurt me, but he would never let anything touch me either.

It's you that matters though, just you.

You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny

And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.

That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.