Geraldine Brooks Quotes

[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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hands float out to touch each other, fingertip to fingertip. In a day, two days, they will glide on, a funeral flotilla, past the unfinished white dome rising out of its scaffolds on a muddy hill in Washington. Will the citizens recognize them, the brave fallen, and uncover in a gesture of respect? Or will they turn away, disgusted by the bloated mass of human rot?

~ Geraldine Brooks

You know that your church has always taken a view on these matters very different from ours, from the day that the first printing press was assembled. Your church did not want your holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avokat ha kodesh, a holy work. Some rabbis even likened the press to an altar. We call it 'writing with many pens' and saw it as furthering the spread of the word that began with Moses on Mount Sinai. 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.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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.

~ 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

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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ 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

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.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss – which was his rage – and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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.

~ 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