Geraldine Brooks quotes

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. (Geraldine Brooks)
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying. (Geraldine Brooks)
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind. (Geraldine Brooks)
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks