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Geraldine Brooks Quotes | Quotes said by Geraldine Brooks

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #1

    [The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story.
    What do you mean?
    Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.


  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #2

    A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #3

    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 Quote #4

    All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #5

    Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #15

    I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face.

    We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #18

    I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #19

    I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #20

    I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hands float out to touch each other, fingertip to fingertip. In a day, two days, they will glide on, a funeral flotilla, past the unfinished white dome rising out of its scaffolds on a muddy hill in Washington. Will the citizens recognize them, the brave fallen, and uncover in a gesture of respect? Or will they turn away, disgusted by the bloated mass of human rot?

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #21

    Is it ever thus, at the end of things? 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 Quote #22

    It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along....So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium and bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble (pp. 345-346)

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.

    She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.
    (pg 39)

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #27

    Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #28

    The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.

  • Geraldine Brooks Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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