Top 120 Geraldine Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “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

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

— Geraldine Brooks

103. “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

104. “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

105. “Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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. “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

123. “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

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. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

131. “Nothing illegal. Just the business itself – racing horses before they should even be ridden, wrecking their bones before they’ve finished growing.”

— Geraldine Brooks

132. “It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

135. “It wasn’t a good idea to speak without putting a deal of thought into it. Words could be snares. Less of them you laid out there, less likely they could trap you up.”

— Geraldine Brooks