Top 160 Geraldine Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment. Pg 163.”

— Geraldine Brooks

102. “And he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader.”

— Geraldine Brooks

103. “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

104. “I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.”

— Geraldine Brooks

105. “A woman had thrown her own babe down a well. When she was brought to answer for the murder, she said that one great good had come of her evil act. At last, she said, she was free of the uncertainty that had plagued her every waking thought: was she numbered among the damned or the saved? Her whole life had been bent about that question. Finally, she knew.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

107. “Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.”

— Geraldine Brooks

108. “I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It’s the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as “Massholes.”

— Geraldine Brooks

109. “It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.”

— Geraldine Brooks

110. “A man’s thoughts and the ability to express them come from God, and if my words find favor, may it be to his honor.”

— Geraldine Brooks

111. “To believe, to act, and to have events confound you – I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong – how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.”

— Geraldine Brooks

112. “Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.”

— Geraldine Brooks

113. “How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?”

— Geraldine Brooks

114. “It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. I can figure out who they were, or how they worked.”

— Geraldine Brooks

115. “As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people.”

— Geraldine Brooks

116. “For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts – great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.”

— Geraldine Brooks

117. “Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her.”

— Geraldine Brooks

118. “There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men. – Heinrich Heine.”

— Geraldine Brooks

119. “If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition,” she said in one widely reported speech, “then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us.” Iran.”

— Geraldine Brooks

120. “When she thought of the letter beit, it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. ‘They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.’ In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy.”

— Geraldine Brooks

121. “Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They.”

— Geraldine Brooks

122. “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

123. “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.” I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description.”

— Geraldine Brooks

124. “I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming.”

— Geraldine Brooks

125. “Well, they say trauma etches the neurons, and I was traumatized by my appalling behavior.” Typical, Theo thought. He’d been accused, yet she was traumatized.”

— Geraldine Brooks

126. “I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.”

— Geraldine Brooks

127. “Why, I wondered, did we, all of us, both the rector in his pulpit and simple Lottie in her croft, seek to put the Plague in unseen hands? Why should this thing be either a test of faith sent by God, or the evil working of the Devil in the world? One of these beliefs we embraced, the other we scorned as superstition. But perhaps each was false, equally. Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.”

— Geraldine Brooks

128. “But every time I had the opportunity, I lacked the will.”

— Geraldine Brooks

129. “Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand.”

— Geraldine Brooks

130. “He leaned into Darley’s flank and felt the horse respond with gentle acceptance. Only horses were honest, in the end.”

— Geraldine Brooks

131. “Whatever his father said about angles of stifles, cow hocks or spavins, all horses were handsome and good. You just had to find the right use for them.”

— Geraldine Brooks

132. “The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There’s generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.”

— Geraldine Brooks

133. “Mares had the capability to slow birthing so that the foal would have the dark hours to find its feet and be ready to run from a predator by dawn.”

— Geraldine Brooks

134. “Hoodies up, heads bent, they passed one another in silence, like monks on their way to matins.”

— Geraldine Brooks

135. “After the second surgery, the orthopedist asked me if I’d regret not riding anymore. I looked at her as if she were the mad one, told her I’d be back on as soon as the sutures were out.”

— Geraldine Brooks

136. “Once he began to speak, the sound of it was so compelling that you focused all your thoughts upon the words, and not upon the man who uttered them. 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

137. “That is the world as it is. If you do not like it, join me in attemping to change it.”

— Geraldine Brooks

138. “What really is at stake? The subjects are Black, the painters White, yet you want to argue against objectification in this case?”

— Geraldine Brooks

139. “He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.”

— Geraldine Brooks

140. “No one cared about injuries. Not when you’re flying down the field, you and the horse – ” He was suddenly animated. “You’re one being, like a centaur. The best ponies are total athletes. They find the line of the ball without you doing anything. One time I came off – my fault, not the pony’s – and she went on, tearing down the field, and blocked my opponent’s shot as if I were still riding her.”

— Geraldine Brooks

141. “In his writing, he was always at his funniest, his smartest, his most thoughtful, and his most courageous and adventurous. Prose so good it would make you laugh until you cried. I recognize now his books are not the shade of him, they’re the quintessence of his soul, the distillation of a great adventurer and a good man. He’s still with us through those books.”

— Geraldine Brooks

142. “Of course it is. How do you think artists become known? Critics, dealers – they are the people who develop the public taste. Without them, we starve.”

— Geraldine Brooks

143. “All men are equal on the turf or under it.”

— Geraldine Brooks

144. “These nineteenth-century horses were stronger and healthier, capable of massive endurance as well as thrilling speed. They ran four miles, you know – heats – up to three times in a single day. They were tough.”

— Geraldine Brooks

145. “The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man’s own gift of speed against him.”

— Geraldine Brooks

146. “Life looked well enough there. It was what you couldn’t see that rubbed your soul raw.”

— Geraldine Brooks

147. “Hard to say the right thing, these days.”

— Geraldine Brooks

148. “It’s more important, sometimes, to find the right word than to sketch a true likeness.”

— Geraldine Brooks

149. “Want to be free? Course I do. But a soldier ain’t free.” He thought about May’s husband, his shattered arm, his uncertain future. “I respect the men who joined your army, I do. But I’ve been taking orders all my life, and now I’m giving them.”

— Geraldine Brooks

150. “In her essay “On Grief” Jennifer Senior quotes a therapist who likens the survivors of loss to passengers on a plane that has crashed into a mountaintop and must find their way down. All have broken bones; none can assist the others. Each will have to make it down alone.”

— Geraldine Brooks