Geraldine Brooks quotes - page 2

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)
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self? View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own. (Geraldine Brooks)
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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? View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
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. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books. (Geraldine Brooks)
And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues. View quote
Geraldine Brooks