Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

The practice of mutilating women's genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The

He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.

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.

Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.

When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss – which was his rage – and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.

If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?

My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute," said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.

All this is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was—the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan's warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.

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.

One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind.

Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.

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

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

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.

I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.

In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.

who they were, or how they worked. That's how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge. It's what I love best about what I do. And there were so many

we may stand at safe distance from one another, so that the ill do not infect the well.

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.

Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat.

Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him.

The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.

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