Geraldine Brooks Quotes & Sayings

under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable. — Geraldine Brooks

In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honour from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically subhuman and dishonourable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult. — Geraldine Brooks

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

The point is the effort — Geraldine Brooks

She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things. — Geraldine Brooks

There's a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we're going to hold the door, when in reality we've got no intention of it. He calls it to elefain. — Geraldine Brooks

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. — Geraldine Brooks

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns. — Geraldine Brooks

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind. — Geraldine Brooks

Used personal and place-names in their transliteration — Geraldine Brooks

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

I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life's injustices: that the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. My creditors would come to me most graciously, diffident, if not downright apologetic, for asking what was theirs. It was as if I would be doing them a great, unlooked for kindness if only I would pay them a trifling sum on my outstanding debts. I would give them tea, and polite conversation, and, even when my answer to their just entreaty had to be a regretful, "Nothing, sir, " my mortification was always entirely self-inflicted, for their civility never failed — Geraldine Brooks

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

Some would say it was a pact with the devil, and therefore I am not bound by it. But after that day I was no longer certain that Tequamuck was Satan's servant. To be sure, father and every other minister in my lifetime has warned that Satan is guileful and adept at concealing his true purpose. But since that day I have come to believe that it is not for us to know the subtle mind of God. It may be, as Caleb thought, that Satan is God's angel still, and works in ways that are obscure to us, to do his will. Blasphemy? Heresy? Perhaps. And perhaps I am damned for it. I will know, soon enough. — Geraldine Brooks

David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic. — Geraldine Brooks

girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy - the excision of the clitoris - and infibulation - the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn't bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

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

Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause. — Geraldine Brooks

And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the author of it all? The appetites we have all come from Him; they have been with us since Eden. If we slip and fall, He understands our weakness. Did not mighty King David lust, and was he not driven through his lust to do great wrong? And yet God loved David, and gave us, through him, the glory of the Psalms. So, too, — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so. — Geraldine Brooks

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

If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell. — Geraldine Brooks

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

[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

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

When she thought of the letter beit, it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. 'They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.' In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy. — Geraldine Brooks

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

Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day. — Geraldine Brooks

The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him. — Geraldine Brooks

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. — Geraldine Brooks

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

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. — Geraldine Brooks

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. — Geraldine Brooks

How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them. — Geraldine Brooks

For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind. — Geraldine Brooks

In most Muslim countries women are the custodians of their male relatives' honor. If — Geraldine Brooks

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

I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. — Geraldine Brooks

I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed. — Geraldine Brooks

So, you are happy to be a pigeon?"
"Maybe so. But at least a pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert. — Geraldine Brooks

This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh. — Geraldine Brooks

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

Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites' worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place ... full of faeces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men's semen. — Geraldine Brooks

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

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us? — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat. — Geraldine Brooks

This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition
an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [ ... ] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [ ... ] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.' [ ... ] He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed ... — Geraldine Brooks

I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now. — Geraldine Brooks

I do not ask for your abosolution. I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to so the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way. That, at least, has been my path — Geraldine Brooks

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral. — Geraldine Brooks

His spirit is like a guttering candle — Geraldine Brooks

He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds - what matter? Cast them into the air. You cannot even find them when they land upon the ground. But there are more grains than you can count. There is no end to them. You will pour across this land, and we will be smothered. Your stone walls, your dead trees, the hooves of your strange beasts trampling the clam beds. My uncle sees these things, here and now. And in his trance, he sees that worse is coming. You walls will rise everywhere until they shut us out. You will turn the land upside down with your ploughs until all the hunting grounds are gone. This, and more, my uncle sees. — Geraldine Brooks

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

The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters. — Geraldine Brooks

You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee." I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description. — Geraldine Brooks

I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

This was a woman raised in a turbulent house, who had learned early to master herself. — Geraldine Brooks

Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought now beyond the span of years, and into a future that glistened ahead into centuries. It's one thing, I suppose, to have a prophet tell you that you will found a dynasty. Now, it seemed, he allowed himself to truly believe it. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile - if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As — Geraldine Brooks

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative. — Geraldine Brooks

women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. — Geraldine Brooks

It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearteed, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing "meek" with "weak. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

My mother was an excellent woman. Pious, virtuous. Kind. But she was not the intellectual equal of my father. Not by any means. I do not speak of book learning. I speak of a certain innate quality of mind, a superior understanding. Because she had it not, their companionship was - diminished. Father looked to his books, rather than to his wife. — Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace. — Geraldine Brooks

I had come to think that the Wampanoag, who dealt so kindly with their babes, were wiser than we in this. What profit was there in requiring little ones to behave like adults? Why bridle their spirits and struggle to break their God-given nature before they had the least understanding of what was wanted of them? — Geraldine Brooks

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