Geraldine Brooks Quotes

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

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

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.

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

I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.