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Top Geraldine Brooks Quotes

Browse top 98 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Geraldine Brooks.

Favorite Geraldine Brooks Quotes

1. "Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion." ~ Geraldine Brooks
2. "I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones." ~ Geraldine Brooks
3. "I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes — warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays — and reflected on the diversity of God's creation, and what might be the use and meaning of his making so many varieties of a single thing. If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble making so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world." ~ Geraldine Brooks
4. "I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other's roasting pan reminds her she's ravenous." ~ Geraldine Brooks
5. "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
6. "When she had discovered that I hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds." ~ Geraldine Brooks
7. "If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell." ~ Geraldine Brooks
8. "At sunset, if I am near the water - and it is hard to be very far from it here -I pause to watch the splendid disc set the brine aflame and then douse itself in it's own fiery broth." ~ Geraldine Brooks
9. "I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace." ~ Geraldine Brooks
10. "I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others." ~ Geraldine Brooks
11. "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
12. "It went on from there. One last, god-awful, no-holds-barred blue; one of those fights where you pour out every poisonous thought you've ever had, the dregs of every grievance, and you set the cup in front of the other person and force them to drink it." ~ Geraldine Brooks
13. "I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings." ~ Geraldine Brooks
14. "I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book." ~ Geraldine Brooks
15. "So, you are happy to be a pigeon?""Maybe so. But at least a pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert." ~ Geraldine Brooks
16. "He did not turn. Embracing his sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the centre, where the ice was thin. His sister's head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way." ~ Geraldine Brooks
17. "Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life." ~ Geraldine Brooks
18. "In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honour from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically subhuman and dishonourable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult." ~ Geraldine Brooks
19. "Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites' worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place…full of faeces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men's semen." ~ Geraldine Brooks
20. "Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.(pg 39)" ~ Geraldine Brooks
21. "She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them." ~ Geraldine Brooks
22. "She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed." ~ Geraldine Brooks
23. "The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan." ~ Geraldine Brooks
24. "To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God. . . . It is what we must strive for." ~ Geraldine Brooks
25. "But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference." ~ Geraldine Brooks
26. "This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh." ~ Geraldine Brooks
27. "You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb" ~ Geraldine Brooks
28. "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
29. "Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves." ~ Geraldine Brooks
30. "[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story."What do you mean?"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that." ~ Geraldine Brooks
31. "...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361" ~ Geraldine Brooks
32. "If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt." ~ Geraldine Brooks
33. "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." ~ Geraldine Brooks
34. "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
35. "Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink." ~ Geraldine Brooks
36. "...the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve."Bethia as an old woman about to diep 257" ~ Geraldine Brooks
37. "No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation." ~ Geraldine Brooks
38. "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." ~ Geraldine Brooks
39. "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
40. "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
41. "I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved." ~ Geraldine Brooks
42. "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." ~ Geraldine Brooks
43. "Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it." ~ Geraldine Brooks
44. "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." ~ Geraldine Brooks
45. "'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon." ~ Geraldine Brooks
46. "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." ~ Geraldine Brooks
47. "Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine." ~ Geraldine Brooks
48. "My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal." ~ Geraldine Brooks
49. "The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know." ~ Geraldine Brooks
50. "When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear." ~ Geraldine Brooks
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Confession can be good for the soul, but it can exact a heavy toll on friendships."
Author: C.D. Payne

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