Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many

a few dreamers believed you could build a nation upon ideas such as liberty and equality.

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said.

To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls—was wicked. His

Hey man, how's things in Chocolate

They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The

Wildness and wet . . . let them be left . . . ' " " 'Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." —Ali ibn Abu Taleb, husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and founder of the Shiite sect of Islam

It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed.

it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.

But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong- how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible

From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.

David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.

When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.

Eved hamalek. The servant of the king.

This was a woman raised in a turbulent house, who had learned early to master herself.

Not just Horse," she said. "The horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We

After a little time, we began to learn some of what they had known: that a compound of mullein and rue, sweet cicely and mustard oil makes an excellent syrup for quieting a cough; that boiled willow bark eases aches and fevers; that betony, bruised for a green plaster, speeds mending of wounds and scrapes.

man will silence the voice of his conscience when it suits him to commit sin. But