Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.

Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.

Who wouldn't be in a state of denial when your next-door neighbor suddenly starts shooting at you, casually and without remorse, like you're some kind of unwanted introduced species.

You must school your mind and not let your fears be your master.

We will need to give you a Muslim name…does Leila suit you?" "I don't deserve this kindness," she whispered. "That you, Muslims, should help a Jew—" "Come now!" Serif said, realizing that she was about to cry. "Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham. Your new name, do you know it means 'evening' both in Arabic, the language of our Holy Koran, and also in Hebrew, the language of your Torah?

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet.

Since they have no choice. I felt myself tumbling from the high plain onto which Mr. Mompellion's sermon that morning had lofted me. What choice had we, after all?

the heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow.

Hoodies up, heads bent, they passed one another in silence, like monks on their way to matins.

How could an unlearned youth such as White write with such wisdom and resignation, while I, brimful of philosophy and book learning, was unable to still my heart into patience?

No one cared about injuries. Not when you're flying down the field, you and the horse—" He was suddenly animated. "You're one being, like a centaur. The best ponies are total athletes. They find the line of the ball without you doing anything. One time I came off—my fault, not the pony's—and she went on, tearing down the field, and blocked my opponent's shot as if I were still riding her.

I mean, not everything has to be about race, does

Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. "I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If

They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The

Politics needs a certain mental ability," explained Ahmad Saati, the university's spokesman. "Very few women have this kind of mind." I

Women, it says, "manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The

there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to do the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way.

The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women's academy. To find out, he commandeered the men's academy shooting range and ordered the women to redo the test. There he watched in growing astonishment as bullet after bullet slammed home, right smack in the center of the target.

women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.

As I set my foot upon the path leading to that little brown house, I felt like an impostor. Surely, I had no business here. This was the house of another man. A man I remembered. A person of moral certainty, and some measure of wisdom, whom many called courageous. How could I masquerade as such a one? For I was a fool, a coward, uncertain of everything.

Mares had the capability to slow birthing so that the foal would have the dark hours to find its feet and be ready to run from a predator by dawn.

He wanted to get down his reactions to that painting, exactly what he'd noticed and his response to it. You never get a second chance to have a first impression.

Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he'd told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.