Emma Donoghue's Room: Kindle highlights

Author Emma Donoghue received an Academy Award nomination for adapting her own work to the silver screen, penning the screenplay for Room, the Lenny Abrahamson-directed film based on her 2010 novel of the same name.

After winning the coveted People’s Choice Award at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival, Room, which tells the story of a young mother (Brie Larson) raising her son (Jacob Tremblay) in captivity after being abducted as a teenager, went on to receive major nominations for Donoghue’s screenplay throughout awards season, including recognition from both the BAFTA and Golden Globe Awards ahead of its Best Picture Oscar nod.

Thanks to Amazon, you can see below the most highlighted Kindle passages from Donoghue’s novel, which laid the foundation for a film that captured hearts and earned Brie Larson her first Oscar nomination.

• “It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
• “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 the jobs and all the living as well. In Room, me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”
• “Also everywhere 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 so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear.”
• “When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.”
• “I don’t say because of manners, but actually he’s got it backwards. In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary.”
• “Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.”
• “When I was four I didn’t know about the world, or I thought it was only stories. Then Ma told me about it for real and I thought I knowed everything. But now I’m in the world all the time, I actually don’t know much, I’m always confused.”
• “ ‘The Soul selects her own Society—Then—shuts the Door—’”
• “Driving home I see the playground but it’s all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side. “Oh, Jack, that’s a different one,” says Grandma. There’s playgrounds in every town.” Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.”
• “I’ve been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what’s going to hurt.”