Emma Donoghue

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

People move around so much in the world, things get lost.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

... where there's one there's ten.'That's crazy math.

The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

Everybody's damaged by something.

People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.

Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.

At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture

Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

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.

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

A lot of the world seems to repeat itself

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.

[E]verywhere 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.

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.