Geraldine Brooks Quotes

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.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ 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

At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? 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

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one—this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.(pg 39)

~ Geraldine Brooks

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.

~ Geraldine Brooks

I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ 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

Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

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

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

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.

~ Geraldine Brooks