Geraldine Brooks Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Running, Hands, Supernatural Forces

  Geraldine Brooks (2006). “March”, p.140, Penguin

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• 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

  Mother, Rights, Years

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• I was really interested in how marriages work, how you can, you know, be in love with somebody and spend many years with your lives intertwined, but in the end another soul can be fundamentally unknowable. And I think that the stress of war, when one party goes away and the other has to deal at home, is a really testing time in a lot of marriages.

  Geraldine Brooks

  War, Stress, Party

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• It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Memories, Love You, Believe

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Husband, Cancer, Phones

  4 Copy quote

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

  Geraldine Brooks

  War, Sacrifice, Thinking

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• How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Sorry, Good Day, Simple

  Geraldine Brooks (2002). “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague”, p.123, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Ambition, Thinking, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Pages, Sometimes

  4 Copy quote

• '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

  Years, Icons, America

  7 Copy quote

• While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cancer, Ideas, Age

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• 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

  People, Four, Months

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• 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

  Children, Heart, Kids

  7 Copy quote

• But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Believe, Psych, Who We Are

  Geraldine Brooks (2011). “Boyer Lectures 2011: The Idea of Home”, p.12, HarperCollins Australia

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Dad, Book

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• And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Thinking, Doctors, Hair

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• The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Sadness, Views, World

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• My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Kind, Gals, Paragraph

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• I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the first that didn't need to. By the 1980's when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Art, Home, Ambition

  Geraldine Brooks (2011). “Boyer Lectures 2011”, p.9, HarperCollins Australia

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