Geraldine Brooks (writer) Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

Geraldine Brooks
I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the first that didn't need to. By the 1980's when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions.

Geraldine Brooks
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
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
But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.

Geraldine Brooks
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

Geraldine Brooks
The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.

Geraldine Brooks
How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.

Geraldine Brooks
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

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.

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.

Geraldine Brooks
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.

Geraldine Brooks
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

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.

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.

Geraldine Brooks
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

Geraldine Brooks
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.

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.

Geraldine Brooks
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

Geraldine Brooks
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