Frog Music Quotes

“People have no idea of the things that don't happen to them—the lives they're not living, the deaths stalking them—and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all the hovering possibilities, like insects thickening the air.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“better keep your mouth shut and seem stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Jenny was easy to enjoy but hard to know.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“[She] was easy to enjoy but hard to know.”
...
“It’s unbearable, the not knowing.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“If you're sorry, folks can tell. No use piling on the verbiage.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre, meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no?”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Unknown Assassin, says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre to see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the army at Little Bighorn.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“I'm just preparing the way, just like John the Baptist for Our Lord.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Jenny wouldn't be dead if she'd never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P'tit wouldn't exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat's cocky smile.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“(Blanche has already steeled herself, knowing that the Irish can’t cook.)”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“she feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that's mixed with piss and can't be separated from it.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

“Some folks just like to hit kids,' remarks Jenny, 'the way others like a drink.'
'Oh, Maman liked that too,' says Blanche as she heads up the stairs. She thinks of her bedbound grandmother who shared Blanche's mattress and taught her all the old songs sotto voce, mouth to ear.”
― Emma Donoghue, Frog Music