Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he'd just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. "She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her," he said with distaste. After

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. Yet this seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal.

Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies.

One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right.

She believed that each humble thing, if done worthily, might be touched by grace. I hoped it might be so, for it would require an abundance of grace to clean me of my sin.

There was malachite green, and red; the intense red known as worm scarlet—tola'at shani in Hebrew—extracted from tree-dwelling insects, crushed up and boiled in lye. Later, when alchemists learned how to make a similar red from sulfur and mercury, they still named the color "little worm"—vermiculum. Some things don't change: we call it vermilion even today.

It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it. And yet, it is not for me to weigh this balance: Christ, and knowledge against a pagan pantheon and an unaccomodated wilderness existence.

Mature trees, bark lacquered black, fingered upward. The twigs formed fine black traceries against the white sky. They reminded Jarret of pencil lines on snowy canvas.

But then again, I was not fifteen anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

With rest you might find the world a small bit brighter.

He wants to think he's from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.

There are confederates lying in this hospital, they say; so there is union at last, a united states of pain.

What an odd course fate charts for us, does it not? Bereavement is the unwelcome current that forced you to an unintended harbor. But here, perhaps, the vessel lies that will carry you onward to the place where you were always meant to go.

He instructed me how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed and how atonement might be made for even the gravest sins.

As he passed me my mittens, he took my hand between his own. "What an odd course fate charts for us, does it not? Bereavement is the unwelcome current that forced you to an unintended harbor. But here, perhaps, the vessel lies that will carry you onward to the place where you were always meant to go.

She wasn't any kind of show pony.

And yet some memories cannot be rooted out like weeds, no matter how much one wills to do it.

fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? 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? I read on, and I find myself smiling at that sound-fleshed young girl, her daring and her folly and her many fears.

The trouble with weeping was that once begun, it became almost impossible to stop.

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. So was that commencement a celebration.

The tips of his fingers glistened with the lamb grease from my cheek. I brought them to my lips and licked them, slowly, one by one.

The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home.

No, no," he said. "She can't raise it at all. She may only clap. Women must be very careful of their voices. If