Geraldine Brooks Quotes

I lifted the latch, and there he stood, dark and tall, the scholar's gown falling from his shoulders like the cloak of the Black Knight in the old tale. His arms were laden with boughs of apple blossom. He lifted a branch, high over my head, and shook it, so that the petals showered me, releasing a heady scent that promised spring.

So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.

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.

His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in some kind of beast or bird, who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life. In those cold woods, he would learn his destiny. He said that if the spirit guide came to him in the form of a snake, then he would gain his heart's desire, and become pawaaw.
"I thought of the quarantine of Jesus, a similar harsh and lonely trial of character and purpose. But that vigil passed in searing desert, not snowy wood. And when, at the end, the devil came with his visions of cities and offers of power, Jesus shunned him. Caleb desired to bid him welcome.

I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.

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

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.

I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings.

I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.

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

The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.

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.

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

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.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.

If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?

[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.

This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky.

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

I have now traveled so far south that I find myself come to a place where our common expression "white as snow" has no useful meaning. Here, one who wishes his words to make plain sense had better say "white as cotton." I will not say that I find the landscape lovely. We go on through Nature to God, and my Northern eye misses the grandeur that eases that ascent. I yearn for mountains, or at least for the gentle ridges of Massachusetts; the sweet folds and furrows that offer the refreshment of a new vista as each gap or summit is obtained. Here all is obvious, a song upon a single note. One wakes and falls asleep to a green sameness, the sun like a pale egg yolk, peering down from a white sky.
And the river! Water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird. Brown as treacle, wider than a harbor, this is water sans sparkle or shimmer. In places, it roils as if heated below by a hidden furnace. In others, it sucks the light down and gives back naught but an inscrutable sheen that conceals both depth and shallows. It is a mountebank, this river. It feigns a gentle lassitude, yet coiled beneath are currents that have crushed the trunks of mighty trees, and swept men to swift drownings…

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.

I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.

We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that's all, while the world - how do you say? - got its act together.

one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

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.

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.

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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?'

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.

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

For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts - great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.

The greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.

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.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

The good young man went out and I felt the great relief that simple kindness can work. It is a salve of the spirit, surely.

I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.

the truth from his ears, waxed strong.

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

How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?

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.

To believe, to act, and to have events confound you - I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong - how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.

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

Adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.
The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat.

I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.

Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home - it is not much,
I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom.
I will not lightly surrender it.

You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah's child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that." "But I might have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead." "You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point." "Then what, pray, is the point?" His voice was a dry, soft rattle, like a breeze through a bough of dead leaves. "The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed - what you sincerely believed, including the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' - acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you - I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong - how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible." And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my piece, again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow. For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved this man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer.

We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are.

But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.

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

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.

You," he continued, grabbing my wrist. "All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't. 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.

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

the heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow.

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.

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.

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

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.

Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss
that means to send someone up, make fun of them.

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.

You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

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

We cannot know the future, nor can we change it, ... It is best to be realistic about such things. But we have the time we have been given. So let us treasure it while we can.

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

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.

Perhaps it was pride, merely, to seek these souls that God had chosen to abandon. Perhaps it was in itself a sin….

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

The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The

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.

The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.

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 ...

He said that the music - its order and precision - helped him find the patterns in things - the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.

For a seer, I was remarkably obtuse.

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.

David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.

To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.

He did not turn. Embracing his sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the centre, where the ice was thin. His sister's head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way.

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

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.

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

Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her.

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.

I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school.

But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts.

It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.

The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.

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

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

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.

When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.

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.