Geraldine Brooks Quotes

From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped.

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

The man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor.

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

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

Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some

But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid.

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

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

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

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

A man's thoughts and the ability to express them come from God, and if my words find favor, may it be to his honor.

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.

Some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus - fewer

For a seer, I was remarkably obtuse.

All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many

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

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward's talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.

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

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

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

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

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

Used personal and place-names in their transliteration

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.

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand.

Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.

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

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.

He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.

I've watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life.

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

In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.

Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce.

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

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

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.

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

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

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

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

Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.

The point is the effort

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

David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.

He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?

I think the seeds of my love were planted there, in the ground that my father's madness harrowed.

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.

They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The

It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.

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.

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

The priest Zadok looked stricken. He had hoped to bargain information for a higher price. Now I, as a prophet, had given it to David for free.

The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.

The surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.
Bethia as an old woman about to die
p 257

I never promised I would write the truth. I

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation.

So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.

One does not have to be a priest to be a man!

I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.

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.

A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

And yet what manner of man would I be, who has so much to say in the contest of words, if now I shirked this contest of blood?

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.

Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

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

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

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

This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

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.

He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill.

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 felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin?

It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed.

the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.

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

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

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

I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other's roasting pan reminds her she's ravenous.

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.

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

She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

In Muslim societies men's bodies just weren't seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women's. Getting