Top 120 Geraldine Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

3. “The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one’s own.”

— Geraldine Brooks

4. “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

5. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

6. “To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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7. “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

8. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

10. “How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them.”

— Geraldine Brooks

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

16. “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

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

— Geraldine Brooks

18. “Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.”

— Geraldine Brooks

19. “Only horses were honest, in the end.”

— Geraldine Brooks

20. “I USED TO LOVE this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there’d be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came.”

— Geraldine Brooks

21. “I don’t rightly know who was my great-grandfather, much less his father. How come you know that about a horse?”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

23. “I had come to think that the Wampanoag, who dealt so kindly with their babes, were wiser than we in this. What profit was there in requiring little ones to behave like adults? Why bridle their spirits and struggle to break their God-given nature before they had the least understanding of what was wanted of them?”

— Geraldine Brooks

24. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

25. “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

26. “The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.”

— Geraldine Brooks

27. “But how would we repay the kindness of those who received us, if we carried the seeds of the Plague to them? What burden would we bear if, because of us, hundreds die who might have lived?”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

29. “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

30. “I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.”

— Geraldine Brooks

31. “Until Islam’s articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectomy and honor killings will continue. And much more importantly, so will the practices themselves, at the cost of so many Muslim women’s health and happiness.”

— Geraldine Brooks

32. “Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth – an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.”

— Geraldine Brooks

33. “For the hour in which I am able to lose myself in someone else’s thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories.”

— Geraldine Brooks

34. “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

35. “I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.”

— Geraldine Brooks

36. “My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute,” said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

38. “It is this notion of women’s barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.”

— Geraldine Brooks

39. “Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat.”

— Geraldine Brooks

40. “Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.”

— Geraldine Brooks

41. “Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward’s talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.”

— Geraldine Brooks

42. “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

43. “For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn’t for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.”

— Geraldine Brooks

44. “Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father’s nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor.”

— Geraldine Brooks

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

47. “There’s a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we’re going to hold the door, when in reality we’ve got no intention of it. He calls it “to elefain.”

— Geraldine Brooks

48. “She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile – if she smiles at a man he will think, ‘Ah, she loves me,’ ” Mohamed explained. As.”

— Geraldine Brooks

49. “All this is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was – the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan’s warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks