Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

when every day was tainted by the foul breath of a fear that could not be faced forthrightly, yet could not be ignored.

She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things.

And he'd grown as a cactus grows, bitter and prickly and tough enough to survive what came his way.

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

In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds' opportunity to whisper in their prince's ear.

trouble is, these people don't understand their own culture," said

What kind of a life could one have, after all, if a family allowed itself to be torn apart-by war, by necessitous circumstances, or a wedge driven into the heart by a crises of trust?

You can ask for things, but you can't just reach out and take things as if it's your right." A

do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change.

But the pods also held the things people had created—the finest examples of the artistry and the ingenuity of our own species. How could we be so creative and so destructive at the same time?

We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that's all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.

used personal and place-names in their transliteration

But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid.

The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.

Randoll burst through the blanket-door when he heard his lusty son, and his big miner's hand fluttered like a moth from the damp head of the babe to his wife's flushed cheek and back again, as if he didn't know which of them he most wanted to touch.

How the more you looked, the more you gleaned. All the 'ways of seeing' that John Berger wrote about.

But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts.

Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some

Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God's holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

For these women, Hamas's view of women was laughable. And since they couldn't hear the appeal of such views themselves, they were deaf to the appeal they held for their students.

You cannot right injustice by injustice.

To the contrary, he knew the ascetic beauty of such a way of being. He lived every moment mindful of the 613 commandments of the Torah. It was natural to him to separate the milk from the meat, to refrain from labor on the Sabbath, to abide by the laws of family purity in his relations with his wife. The disciplines of that monthly abstinence had only sharpened desire and sweetened their reunion. But to be without a wife entirely…that, to him, was no fit life for a man.

My objective was to awaken their hearts to the ideas dormant there, rather than to implant facts into their memory.