Top 100 Geraldine Brooks Quotes
#1. 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
#2. From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.
Geraldine Brooks
#3. under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.
Geraldine Brooks
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.
Geraldine Brooks
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and ... truckloads of guts, you know.
Geraldine Brooks
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I think the seeds of my love were planted there, in the ground that my father's madness harrowed.
Geraldine Brooks
#21. 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
#22. I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.
Geraldine Brooks
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.
Geraldine Brooks
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.
Geraldine Brooks
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.
Geraldine Brooks
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.
Geraldine Brooks
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.
Geraldine Brooks
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.
Geraldine Brooks
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To
Geraldine Brooks
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.
Geraldine Brooks
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.
Geraldine Brooks
#65. 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
#66. She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.
Geraldine Brooks
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
Geraldine Brooks
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The
Geraldine Brooks
#77. 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
#78. And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
Geraldine Brooks
#79. Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
Geraldine Brooks
#80. 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
#81. I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin?
Geraldine Brooks
#82. 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
#83. It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed.
Geraldine Brooks
#84. David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.
Geraldine Brooks
#85. If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell.
Geraldine Brooks
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some
Geraldine Brooks
#91. 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
#92. To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
Geraldine Brooks
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus - fewer
Geraldine Brooks
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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