Top 120 Geraldine Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The.”

— Geraldine Brooks

52. “Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.”

— Geraldine Brooks

53. “The island cried out to me. I longed to feast my senses on its light and air, and restore my spirit with its peace. If I answered its call, soon enough I would live again in the familiar rhythms of its seasons – the wincing winters and dappled summers, its shy, reluctant springtide and gleaming, bronzed leaf fall.”

— Geraldine Brooks

54. “How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65.”

— Geraldine Brooks

55. “Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.”

— Geraldine Brooks

56. “Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn’t instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If.”

— Geraldine Brooks

57. “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

58. “How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth – the many gods, the animate spirit world – and simply recast them in terms of our teaching.”

— Geraldine Brooks

59. “In the heir’s world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.”

— Geraldine Brooks

60. “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

61. “By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel.”

— Geraldine Brooks

62. “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

63. “What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go into this God’s house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house than he would have sent our ancestors such a book.”

— Geraldine Brooks

64. “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

65. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

66. “The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for “source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.” In.”

— Geraldine Brooks

67. “If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We’ve seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon.”

— Geraldine Brooks

68. “In Muslim societies men’s bodies just weren’t seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women’s. Getting.”

— Geraldine Brooks

69. “It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.”

— Geraldine Brooks

70. “I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

72. “I had little wish to recall the callow peddler who would turn over any dank stone in his quest for knowledge.”

— Geraldine Brooks

73. “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

74. “For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village full of sinners or a host of saints.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

76. “The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.”

— Geraldine Brooks

77. “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

78. “Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.”

— Geraldine Brooks

79. “The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The.”

— Geraldine Brooks

80. “And yet what manner of man would I be, who has so much to say in the contest of words, if now I shirked this contest of blood?”

— Geraldine Brooks

81. “One did not need to penetrate David’s secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind.”

— Geraldine Brooks

82. “Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.”

— Geraldine Brooks

83. “When you’re writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can’t go. You can’t suppose. You can’t imagine. And I think there’s something in human nature that wants to finish the story.”

— Geraldine Brooks

84. “But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society’s simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do!”

— Geraldine Brooks

85. “We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize,” she sighed. The.”

— Geraldine Brooks

86. “Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.”

— Geraldine Brooks

87. “It’s too late,” she said, her voice trembling. “You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies’ maid...”

— Geraldine Brooks

88. “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.”

— Geraldine Brooks

89. “What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.”

— Geraldine Brooks

90. “I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way...”

— Geraldine Brooks

91. “I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this is the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong.”

— Geraldine Brooks

92. “West Bank women’s groups argued that the time wasn’t right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women’s rights could be raised. The.”

— Geraldine Brooks

93. “But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky.”

— Geraldine Brooks

94. “When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss – which was his rage – and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.”

— Geraldine Brooks

95. “She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. ‘I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me – but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!”

— Geraldine Brooks

96. “If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?”

— Geraldine Brooks

97. “The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters.”

— Geraldine Brooks

98. “It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.”

— Geraldine Brooks

99. “My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I’m more your paragraph kind of gal.”

— Geraldine Brooks

100. “I am not myself. As you know, better than anyone. You have seen how I am, these last months. I don’t know how to explain it, it is beyond any words that I have to describe. But it is as if there is a tempest in my mind, and I cannot see through the murk of it. I cannot think clearly – indeed, much of the time I cannot think at all. There is only a weight in my heart, a formless dread that shapes itself into pain. And then a greater dread of more pain.”

— Geraldine Brooks