Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Geraldine Brooks, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Geraldine Brooks quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 242 Geraldine Brooks quotes for you to read and share.
Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at. -- Geraldine Brooks
In Muslim societies men's bodies just weren't seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women's. Getting -- Geraldine Brooks
If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon. -- Geraldine Brooks
Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home - it is not much,
I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom.
I will not lightly surrender it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own. -- Geraldine Brooks
I think the seeds of my love were planted there, in the ground that my father's madness harrowed. -- Geraldine Brooks
I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust - the tightening of the throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite - is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books. -- Geraldine Brooks
I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this is the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. -- Geraldine Brooks
As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire. -- Geraldine Brooks
When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing masses of the damned, among whom I must expect to spend eternity. -- Geraldine Brooks
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and ... truckloads of guts, you know. -- Geraldine Brooks
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure. -- Geraldine Brooks
He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. -- Geraldine Brooks
The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. -- Geraldine Brooks
The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik. -- Geraldine Brooks
So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand. -- Geraldine Brooks
He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things. -- Geraldine Brooks
And yet what manner of man would I be, who has so much to say in the contest of words, if now I shirked this contest of blood? -- Geraldine Brooks
This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky. -- Geraldine Brooks
I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions. -- Geraldine Brooks
This night he was a king before he was a man. At this time, this troubled me. Later, I would have cause to wish it were always so. -- Geraldine Brooks
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going. -- Geraldine Brooks
I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin? -- Geraldine Brooks
How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth - the many gods, the animate spirit world - and simply recast them in terms of our teaching. -- Geraldine Brooks
The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature. -- Geraldine Brooks
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us. -- Geraldine Brooks
I have lived most of my life in soldiers' camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk. -- Geraldine Brooks
She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed. -- Geraldine Brooks
From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day. -- Geraldine Brooks
I never promised I would write the truth. I -- Geraldine Brooks
under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable. -- Geraldine Brooks
I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed. -- Geraldine Brooks
I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved. -- Geraldine Brooks
I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right. -- Geraldine Brooks
She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them. -- Geraldine Brooks
From "Caleb's Crossing"
This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers.
"Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me. -- Geraldine Brooks
At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift. -- Geraldine Brooks
David was at his best in group settings, soldier enough to join in the raucous jests, king enough to make it matter that he remembered some moments of bravery or sacrifice, and praised each man accordingly. -- Geraldine Brooks
When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear. -- Geraldine Brooks
I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school. -- Geraldine Brooks
Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self? -- Geraldine Brooks
By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel -- Geraldine Brooks
I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine. -- Geraldine Brooks
At sunset, if I am near the water - and it is hard to be very far from it here -I pause to watch the splendid disc set the brine aflame and then douse itself in it's own fiery broth. -- Geraldine Brooks
A man's thoughts and the ability to express them come from God, and if my words find favor, may it be to his honor. -- Geraldine Brooks
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind. -- Geraldine Brooks
For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind. -- Geraldine Brooks
How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65 -- Geraldine Brooks
The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361 -- Geraldine Brooks
Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth
an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials. -- Geraldine Brooks
Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped. -- Geraldine Brooks
He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state. -- Geraldine Brooks
Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us? -- Geraldine Brooks
Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. -- Geraldine Brooks
Used personal and place-names in their transliteration -- Geraldine Brooks
What kind of a life could one have, after all, if a family allowed itself to be torn apart-by war, by necessitous circumstances, or a wedge driven into the heart by a crises of trust? -- Geraldine Brooks
Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her. -- Geraldine Brooks
Some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus - fewer -- Geraldine Brooks
I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others. -- Geraldine Brooks
In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge. -- Geraldine Brooks
If Islamic countries can't come up with their own principles for women's competition," she said in one widely reported speech, "then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us." Iran -- Geraldine Brooks
When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story. -- Geraldine Brooks
David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting. -- Geraldine Brooks
My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. -- Geraldine Brooks
She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved. -- Geraldine Brooks
It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid ... -- Geraldine Brooks
A canoe paddle is animate, because it causes something else to move. Even a humble onion has, in their view, a soul, since it causes action - pulling tears from the eyes. -- Geraldine Brooks
How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. -- Geraldine Brooks
I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying. -- Geraldine Brooks
Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women's hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men. -- Geraldine Brooks
My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute," said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old. -- Geraldine Brooks
It went on from there. One last, god-awful, no-holds-barred blue; one of those fights where you pour out every poisonous thought you've ever had, the dregs of every grievance, and you set the cup in front of the other person and force them to drink it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan. -- Geraldine Brooks
If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns. -- Geraldine Brooks
In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure. -- Geraldine Brooks
We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that's all, while the world - how do you say? - got its act together. -- Geraldine Brooks
David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants. -- Geraldine Brooks
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. -- Geraldine Brooks
To believe, to act, and to have events confound you - I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong - how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible. -- Geraldine Brooks
So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh ... And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, 'Oh, that'll be bloody lucky!' So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia. -- Geraldine Brooks
He did not turn. Embracing his sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the centre, where the ice was thin. His sister's head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way. -- Geraldine Brooks
My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal. -- Geraldine Brooks
No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation. -- Geraldine Brooks
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves. -- Geraldine Brooks
Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss
that means to send someone up, make fun of them. -- Geraldine Brooks
I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now. -- Geraldine Brooks
The two most sacred documents known to man are the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death than a word of either should be violated in this country. -- Geraldine Brooks
I recognized the tokens of the time, because I had lived through just such another uneasy season, when every day was tainted by the foul breath of a fear that could not be faced forthrightly, yet could not be ignored. -- Geraldine Brooks
I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. -- Geraldine Brooks
You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence. -- Geraldine Brooks
The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The -- Geraldine Brooks
The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. -- Geraldine Brooks
But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts. -- Geraldine Brooks
I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M. -- Geraldine Brooks
He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The point is the effort -- Geraldine Brooks
But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference. -- Geraldine Brooks
We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. -- Geraldine Brooks
Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything. -- Geraldine Brooks
How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them. -- Geraldine Brooks
Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives - usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up. -- Geraldine Brooks
It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues. -- Geraldine Brooks
For these women, Hamas's view of women was laughable. And since they couldn't hear the appeal of such views themselves, they were deaf to the appeal they held for their students. -- Geraldine Brooks
Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade. -- Geraldine Brooks
David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic. -- Geraldine Brooks
Perhaps the giver of the name had meant to trick Cheepi, the devil-god, into thinking him unloved and therefore leaving him alone. -- Geraldine Brooks
For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite. -- Geraldine Brooks
I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole. -- Geraldine Brooks
Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause. -- Geraldine Brooks
I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness. -- Geraldine Brooks
You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat. -- Geraldine Brooks
God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so. -- Geraldine Brooks
I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings. -- Geraldine Brooks
A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman. -- Geraldine Brooks
Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward's talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend. -- Geraldine Brooks
There's a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we're going to hold the door, when in reality we've got no intention of it. He calls it to elefain. -- Geraldine Brooks
Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative. -- Geraldine Brooks
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled. -- Geraldine Brooks
I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as Massholes. -- Geraldine Brooks
It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed. -- Geraldine Brooks
When she had discovered that I hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds. -- Geraldine Brooks
It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade. -- Geraldine Brooks
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader. -- Geraldine Brooks
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books. -- Geraldine Brooks
You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee." I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description. -- Geraldine Brooks
You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb -- Geraldine Brooks
This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet. -- Geraldine Brooks
The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said. -- Geraldine Brooks
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt. -- Geraldine Brooks
The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow. -- Geraldine Brooks
Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some -- Geraldine Brooks
'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon. -- Geraldine Brooks
The greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person. -- Geraldine Brooks
To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God ... It is what we must strive for. -- Geraldine Brooks
Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. -- Geraldine Brooks
Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink. -- Geraldine Brooks
I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds. -- Geraldine Brooks
The priest Zadok looked stricken. He had hoped to bargain information for a higher price. Now I, as a prophet, had given it to David for free. -- Geraldine Brooks
I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way ... -- Geraldine Brooks
If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it? -- Geraldine Brooks
Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan. -- Geraldine Brooks
Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental. -- Geraldine Brooks
He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill. -- Geraldine Brooks
I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see. -- Geraldine Brooks
To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job. -- Geraldine Brooks
She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since. -- Geraldine Brooks
The good young man went out and I felt the great relief that simple kindness can work. It is a salve of the spirit, surely. -- Geraldine Brooks
Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And -- Geraldine Brooks
The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment. Pg 163 -- Geraldine Brooks
The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women's sexuality - both the fear of a "past" and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil. -- Geraldine Brooks
This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh. -- Geraldine Brooks
She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile - if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As -- Geraldine Brooks
Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives. -- Geraldine Brooks
The surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.
Bethia as an old woman about to die
p 257 -- Geraldine Brooks
What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go into this God's house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house than he would have sent our ancestors such a book. -- Geraldine Brooks
Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?' -- Geraldine Brooks
No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them. -- Geraldine Brooks
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share. -- Geraldine Brooks
September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage. -- Geraldine Brooks
I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days. -- Geraldine Brooks
Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce. -- Geraldine Brooks
the heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow. -- Geraldine Brooks
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them. -- Geraldine Brooks
Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand. -- Geraldine Brooks
the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor. -- Geraldine Brooks
Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733. -- Geraldine Brooks
Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there. -- Geraldine Brooks
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work. -- Geraldine Brooks
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence. -- Geraldine Brooks
It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do. -- Geraldine Brooks
Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside. -- Geraldine Brooks
And he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader. -- Geraldine Brooks
When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared. -- Geraldine Brooks
Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss. -- Geraldine Brooks
I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. -- Geraldine Brooks
It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it. -- Geraldine Brooks
To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home - to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls - was wicked. His -- Geraldine Brooks
His spirit is like a guttering candle -- Geraldine Brooks
Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand. -- Geraldine Brooks
One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time. -- Geraldine Brooks
If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell. -- Geraldine Brooks
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative. -- Geraldine Brooks
So it is, out here on this island, where we dwell with our faces to the sea and our backs to the wilderness. Like Adam's family after the fall, we all have things to do. -- Geraldine Brooks
Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral. -- Geraldine Brooks
I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers. -- Geraldine Brooks
If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary. -- Geraldine Brooks
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. -- Geraldine Brooks
Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life. -- Geraldine Brooks
Adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him. -- Geraldine Brooks
Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? -- Geraldine Brooks
One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind. -- Geraldine Brooks
West Bank women's groups argued that the time wasn't right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women's rights could be raised. The -- Geraldine Brooks
We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. -- Geraldine Brooks
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself. -- Geraldine Brooks
It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so. -- Geraldine Brooks
I loved being away from school. I didn't really fancy school that much when I was little; it wasn't until I was in third or fourth grade that I really settled down at school and I was much happier at home with my mum and she was very creative and sort of fostered all my interests. -- Geraldine Brooks
Who is the brave man
he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. -- Geraldine Brooks
I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. -- Geraldine Brooks
One does not have to be a priest to be a man! -- Geraldine Brooks
For a seer, I was remarkably obtuse. -- Geraldine Brooks
So, you are happy to be a pigeon?"
"Maybe so. But at least a pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert. -- Geraldine Brooks
It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for "source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion." In -- Geraldine Brooks
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women. -- Geraldine Brooks
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy. -- Geraldine Brooks
Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it. -- Geraldine Brooks
The man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. -- Geraldine Brooks
If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude. -- Geraldine Brooks
I've watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life. -- Geraldine Brooks
If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion. -- Geraldine Brooks
one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals. -- Geraldine Brooks
the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against "honor" killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls. -- Geraldine Brooks
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can. -- Geraldine Brooks
But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid. -- Geraldine Brooks
The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline. -- Geraldine Brooks
Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day. -- Geraldine Brooks
I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. -- Geraldine Brooks
I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom. -- Geraldine Brooks
It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. -- Geraldine Brooks
This was a woman raised in a turbulent house, who had learned early to master herself. -- Geraldine Brooks
He said that the music - its order and precision - helped him find the patterns in things - the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration. -- Geraldine Brooks
All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many -- Geraldine Brooks
I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me. -- Geraldine Brooks
I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end. -- Geraldine Brooks
How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go? -- Geraldine Brooks
We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are. -- Geraldine Brooks
They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The -- Geraldine Brooks
women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To -- Geraldine Brooks
month - the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget. -- Geraldine Brooks
We cannot know the future, nor can we change it, ... It is best to be realistic about such things. But we have the time we have been given. So let us treasure it while we can. -- Geraldine Brooks
He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that? -- Geraldine Brooks
I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with. -- Geraldine Brooks
I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child. -- Geraldine Brooks
The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere. -- Geraldine Brooks
Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard. -- Geraldine Brooks
I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other's roasting pan reminds her she's ravenous. -- Geraldine Brooks
The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think -- Geraldine Brooks
In most Muslim countries women are the custodians of their male relatives' honor. If -- Geraldine Brooks
Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. -- Geraldine Brooks
Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat. -- Geraldine Brooks
the truth from his ears, waxed strong. -- Geraldine Brooks
