Emma Donoghue Quotes

If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.

Everybody nose dive, hold your breath, count to five. Back slap, booby trap, cover it up in bubble wrap. Room shake, earth quake, find a way to stay awake. It's going to blow, it's going to break, this is more than I can take.

I went to lunch at the Ivy. People started running across the street, and one guy almost got hit by a car. I started to freak out. That put me into hiding for three weeks. I didn't leave the house.

I can understand; you are really in a mess and there is no way out. I have heard that there are three rings of love: the engagement ring, the wedding ring and the suffer-ring.

When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn't. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything.

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet.

I was much more upset by the situation with Jacob than by the possibility of being eaten by a bear.

I didn't want it to be this way." "Yes, you did," she said, "because it is." "I just want to be with someone normal," he said. "I just want to have a normal life." "Excuse me," she said. "You're a little crazy," he said. "You're too old to act the way you do. You've got to grow up. You've got to take care of yourdelf. I'm afraid for you. You can't think that people are going to take care of you all the time.

Women are mad at me. A girl came up to me on the street and she almost smacked me. Like, ‘How could you? How could you let a girl like that go?’ I feel like I want to give people hugs, they seem so sad. Rachel and I should be the ones getting hugs! Instead, we’re consoling everybody else.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

Look, I need to tell you something,' I continued. The words came stumbling out of me. 'I couldnt stand it if...I dont want you to---' Percy?' she said. 'You look like you're going to be sick.' And that's how I felt.

You can't force other people to like you and you just kind of have to ride the wave. I think I could have saved myself a lot of sleepless nights with that advice.

Right after I graduated, my girlfriend, who I had been going out with for five years, dumped me, and my grandmother died.

It’s been a full week since she left and all you’ve done is sulk like a dying cow. (Kish)

You might think being the target of an international terrorist organization, an amnesiac, and a girl with hair dyed in the middle of the night by Macey McHenry would make people stare at you. Well, try walking into the Grand Hall with seriously puffy eyes while holding hands. With a boy.

Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.

You're tearing me apart!

I guess I'll have to change my plan I should have realized there'd be another man Why did I buy those blue pyjamas Before the big affair began? I guess I'll have to change my plan.

I mean, to me, freaking out is different. More of a running away, not telling anyone what's wrong, slowly simmering until you burst kind of thing.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

I am freaking out! I am freaking out, man!

One moment I'm perfectly fine and the next I feel a wave of nausea, then panic. Then I can't catch my breath and I know I'm about to lose control and all I want to do is escape. Except that the one thing I can't escape from is the very thing I want to run away from... me.