283 Quotes by Emma Donoghue

I’ll be in Heaven getting your room ready.

Pretending to misremember a name was such a reliable way to annoy.

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.

Everybody’s damaged by something.

It does sometimes seem as if the nineteenth century hasn’t reached this part of the world yet.” He.

The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.

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

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

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I’ve had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you’re trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.