Geraldine Brooks > Quotes

“For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“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, March

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing

“I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“...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”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

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

“My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust - the tightening of the throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite - is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing

“Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

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

“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, Year of Wonders

“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, March

“You never get a second chance to have a first impression.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Horse

“It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.”
― 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, Caleb's Crossing

“He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing 'meek' with 'weak.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

“...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.”
― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book