The Wonder Quotes.

1. "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

2. "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

3. "And why must it always be presumed that a woman's views are based on personal considerations?"
- Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

4. "May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage."
- Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

5. "Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations. As"
- Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

6. "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

7. "We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism. He"
- Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

8. "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

9. "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

10. "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