"Maybe that's the foundation of my book: how do we come to terms with the death of someone we love when it is impossible to come to terms with such a profound loss? The path I found where I could even ask that question, or maybe advance it beyond what I'd attempted in A Year and a Day, was by straddling the line: this is fiction and memoir, it is true and it isn't."

“Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.”

“But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”

“You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.”

“I remember thinking, when I was in my early 30s, that this is the best age to be, and I still believe your 30s are a wonderful time.”

“Everybody's damaged by something.”

Source : Emma Donoghue (2015). “Room: Picador Classic”, p.167, Pan Macmillan

“A homosexual is the only man who ever meets a man he would like to marry if he were a woman.”

“When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.”

“When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.”

Source : Christopher Alexander (1977). “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”, p.747, Oxford University Press