Geraldine Brooks Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Writing, Past, Empathy

  4 Copy quote

• Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Alive

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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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Passion, Heart

  Geraldine Brooks (2002). “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague”, p.28, Penguin

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• And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Children, Thinking, Israel

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• And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Giving, Share, Happens

  Geraldine Brooks (2002). “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague”, p.76, Penguin

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• 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

  People, September 11, Heroism

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• 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

  Believe, Reading, Phrases

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Real, Moving, Hero

  Geraldine Brooks (2006). “March”, p.106, Penguin

  11 Copy quote

• What's wrong with leading the way? We've played that role before, after all. We gave the world the secret ballot... that did so much to raise living standards and improve conditions for workers worldwide. We were a leader in extending to women the right to vote. We were barely a nation when we set the bar for bravery and sacrifice by common soldiers in foreign wars. We grew up out of racism and misogyny and homophobia to become a mostly tolerant, successful multicultural society. We did these great things because we know we are in it together. It is our core value as Australians.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Leadership, War, Successful

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• 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

  Atheist, Blessing, Thinking

  13 Copy quote

• I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Years, Middle East

  "A Home in Fiction". Boyer Lectures 2011: "The Idea of Home", Lecture 4, www.abc.net.au. December 11, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Mind, Vision

  5 Copy quote

• The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.

  Geraldine Brooks

  People, Noble, Manners

  Geraldine Brooks (2006). “March”, p.16, Penguin

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

  Geraldine Brooks

  Choices, Clear, Edges

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• Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Beautiful, Mistake, Personality

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

  Geraldine Brooks

  Book, Burning, Graves

  Geraldine Brooks (2008). “People of the Book: A Novel”, p.373, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• 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 Al Cap is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Simple, Men

  "A Home in Fiction". Boyer Lectures 2011: "The Idea of Home", Lecture 4, www.abc.net.au. December 11, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Mind, World

  Geraldine Brooks (2002). “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague”, p.98, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

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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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• 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 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

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