Goodbye, Room.” I wave up at Skylight. “Say goodbye,” I tell Ma. “Goodbye, Room.”Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we...

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

…real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you’ve known something worth missing.

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...

Everybody’s damaged by something.

For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.

Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll...

The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.

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,...

You know who you belong to Jack? – Yeah. Yourself. – He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma. p. 261 Room by E Donoghue

…by her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; ‘circle’ sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.

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.

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...

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.

Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they’re real, they’re actually happening in Outside all together. It makes...

Everyone’s got a different story.

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

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...

[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...

I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

A lot of the world seems to repeat itself

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture’s memory.

Nowadays ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.

The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.

Stories are a different kind of true.

I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn’t add up to an hour.

Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. “Anemone,” he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. “Find me a silk to match that.

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.

Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

It was the word ‘late’ that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn’t happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere…

I remember manners, that’s when people are scared to make other persons mad.

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 days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn’t.

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

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

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