Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.

held at Metairie on April 1, two four-mile heats. As he had always purposed, owners would put down five thousand dollars each, and that would make up the winner's purse, less one-thousand-dollar consolation prizes to any entrants that were not distanced.

Women of all ages are in-fantilized by the Saudi system. A woman, no matter how old, has to be able to show a signed permission from her husband, son or grandson before she is free to travel, even inside her own country.

It's so easy for people like me"—a diplomat's son raised abroad and educated in America—"to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept.

Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.

I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world's more than one billion Muslims—a fifth of the world's population—talk to God.

Comfortable with a wide range of people, close to very few.

plans, Lola's doubts revisited her. Branko was a zealot. In Belgrade he'd been interrogated and beaten

The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations—George Sale's for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about sex and marriage, work and holy war.

Whatever his father said about angles of stifles, cow hocks or spavins, all horses were handsome and good. You just had to find the right use for them.

Daniel straightened. "Girl, he should have sped up, kept on running right to a well-lit road, and called some White folk to help her. He just didn't know how he needed to be if he was going to live in this country.

Her gardens, in particular, are highly regarded.

It wasn't bad, but it could not be great.

wealth and connection are no shield against Plague.

Sometimes, I think if you took all the universities and all the hospitals out of greater Boston, you'd be able to fit what's left into about six city blocks

Well," said Catherine. "There you are. Everything in England comes down to class. It wouldn't be the same here, I'm sure." Theo leaned back, frowning. "You think not? The slave-holding classes considered enslaved people subhuman. They referred to them as 'the

He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with

saddleback fever.

Let's go then," I whispered. "Let's go and live, since we have no choice in it.

He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill.

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.

She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.

Perhaps he was like a horse rescued from a barn on fire, who runs back into his burning stall simply because the place is familiar.

the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.