Emma Donoghue Quotes

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.

If you have kids, you feel everything stronger. It's like someone turning the lights on in your inner room.

Having a kid is hard to explain, but when you talk to another parent, you have mutual understanding of what that does to you as a person.

No one tells you how hard being a parent is! We could have had a warning! It is literally the hardest thing I've ever done but I'm loving it.

My worst moments as a parent have been much like my greatest moments as a parent: the product of complete and perfect accident.

Sometimes it's a bizarre, fairly cold, and horrifying thing to be a parent.

As a parent, you experience the most of everything. The most love, the most fear, the most hurt and the most tired, the most of every emotion.

I really don't know how to tell you what it feels like to be a parent.

It's terrifying, that unconditional love you have for a child. I still wonder if she really came from me, from my womb. It's a miracle. I don't understand it. I live it very intensely.

It's like you have a child and you think, 'Everything that I've done up until this point is insignificant in comparison to being a father.' It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

It is always fragile, being a parent.

Parenthood and having kids puts you in touch with a whole other sort of sensitivity which is nothing but good. You feel more than you ever felt. You feel that vulnerability, but at the same time you wouldn't trade it for anything.

Having my son, I mean, I feel already that it makes me a better actress. Just the feeling and the love that expands in my being is more than I ever thought possible.

Becoming a parent gives you access to a whole world of feeling. It gives you a much stronger sense of life and death: becoming a father made me realise my own mortality.

Fatherhood will put a man through a lot, but it's a tremendous job, the best in the world - even better than playing basketball.

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.

I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them and up for the mayhem ahead. But at the same time, I remember noticing I was relieved this thing was present in me. And I hadn't realised there might be a doubt.

The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

What parent has it easy? I just never make the difficulty of it an obstacle. I just do it.

I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.

When you have a child, as anyone knows who has them, that's basically all you want to talk about.

Until you have kids, you can't imagine how much you could possibly love a human being.

I'm the father of two boys and two girls, so I'm more an emotional wreck than a mushball.

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.