The Wonder Quotes

“A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized - as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Your body - every body is a marvel. A wonder of creation. [...] The day your first opened your eyes, Anna, God asked just one thing: that you live.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“And why must it always be presumed that a woman's views are based on personal considerations?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“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.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“If Earth was such unworthy soil for God's best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“(Really, thought Lib, who ever died exultingly? Whatever fool penned that phrase had never sat by a bed with his ears pricked for the last rasp.) Aged”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that’s the sound of God listening.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Little by little; the way out of the mine was as long as the way in.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Colleen; that was what the Irish seemed to call every young female”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“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.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“If the potato blight had been such a long catastrophe, ending only seven years ago, it occurred to Lib that a child now eleven must have been born into hunger. Weaned on it, reared on it; that had to shape a person. Every thrifty inch of Anna's body had learned to make do with less. She's never been greedy or clamoured for treats - that was how Rosaleen O'Donnell had praised her daughter. Anna must have been petted every time she said she'd had plenty. Earned a smile for every morsel she passed on to her brother or the maid.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“A strident female voice causes men's ears to close.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Fate was faceless, life arbitrary, a tale told by an idiot.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Half the country wouldn’t have died if the landlords hadn’t kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn’t thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Pretending to misremember a name was such a reliable way to annoy.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Thank you.” Lib tried to think of some more conversational note to end on. “It’s always intrigued me,” she said, letting her voice rise, “why you Sisters of Mercy are called walking nuns.” “We walk out into the world, you see, Mrs. Wright. We take the usual vows of any order—poverty, chastity, obedience—but also a fourth, service.” Lib had never heard the nun say so much before. “What kind of service?” Anna broke in: “To the sick, the poor, and the ignorant.” “Well remembered, child,” said the nun. “We vow to be of use.” As”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Better to drown in the surf than stand idly by the shore.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“An obsession, a mania, Lib supposed it could be called. A sickness of the mind. Hysteria, as that awful doctor had named it? Anna reminded Lib of a princess under a spell in a fairy tale. What could restore the girl to ordinary life? Not a prince. A magical herb from the world's end? Some shock to jolt a poisoned bite of apple out of her throat? No, something simple as a breath of air: reason. What if Lib shook the girl awake this very minute and said, Come to your senses!

But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad. Standish's wards were full of such people.

Besides, could children ever be considered quite of sound mind? Seven was counted the age of reason, but Lib's sense of seven-year-olds was that they still brimmed over with imagination. Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple.

But Anna was eleven, which was a far cry from seven, Lib argued with herself. Other eleven-year-olds knew when they'd eaten and when they hadn't; they were old enough to tell make-believe from fact. There was something very different about - very wrong with - Anna O'Donnell.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny,”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“I must be cruel, only to be kind,”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn't want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Wasn't it so often the girl --no matter how young-- who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder