Top 100 Geraldine Brooks Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.
Geraldine Brooks
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.
Geraldine Brooks
#11. David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.
Geraldine Brooks
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
Geraldine Brooks
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky.
Geraldine Brooks
#20. It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
Geraldine Brooks
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.
Geraldine Brooks
#28. 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
#29. Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And
Geraldine Brooks
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.
Geraldine Brooks
#35. the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.
Geraldine Brooks
#36. 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
#37. He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill.
Geraldine Brooks
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation.
Geraldine Brooks
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.
Geraldine Brooks
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.
Geraldine Brooks
#51. A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.
Geraldine Brooks
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause.
Geraldine Brooks
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.
Geraldine Brooks
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life.
Geraldine Brooks
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.
Geraldine Brooks
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.
Geraldine Brooks
#74. From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.
Geraldine Brooks
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.
Geraldine Brooks
#80. It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.
Geraldine Brooks
#81. 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
#82. I think the seeds of my love were planted there, in the ground that my father's madness harrowed.
Geraldine Brooks
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.
Geraldine Brooks
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
Geraldine Brooks
#89. 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
#90. How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them.
Geraldine Brooks
#91. Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.
Geraldine Brooks
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and ... truckloads of guts, you know.
Geraldine Brooks
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