Geraldine Brooks famous quotes

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Attitude #Men #Mind

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

#Book #Hands #Mind

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

#Butterfly #Color #Wings

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Perseverance #Persistence #Voice

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Fear #Men #Imagination

Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Thinking #Self #People

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

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 #Kids #Heart

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

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

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

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

#Madness

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#People #Moral #Certainty

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

#War #Sacrifice #Thinking

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

#Imagination #Historical #Fiction

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Dog #Animal #Elephants

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

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

#Writing #Light #Years

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

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#House #Parent #Bigs

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

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

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

#Prayer #Wine #Moon

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

#Kind #Gals #Paragraph

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

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

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

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

I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Hate #Airports #Squares

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

#Book #Burning #Stakes

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Men #Class #Doubt

Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Girl #Vanity #Independence

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

#Giving #Share

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

#War #Stupid #Intelligent

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

#Men #Poverty #Aptitude

...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

#People #Catholic #Tests

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Thinking #Fire #Hands

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

#Cancer #Character #Giving

Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table, making sure everybody's socks match, the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists, but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon, who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Soccer #Art #Real

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

#Sleep #Air #Cities

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 Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Writing #Simple #Men

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

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

'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

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

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

#Dad #Eight #Years