Geraldine Brooks Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

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

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

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?

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

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.

And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can save us as a species. A species that will continue to find comfort and delight in the companionship of animals, the miracle of birds, the colours of the corals and the majesty of the forests. We are in it together, on this blue spinning marble in the cold and silent void. And we must act on that belief, if we are going to be able to continue to live a good life here, in this beautiful and fragile country, on this lovely planet, our only home.

...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

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.

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

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

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.