Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

I've watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life.

others to cover the signs of our

This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.

Once he began to speak, the sound of it was so compelling that you focused all your thoughts upon the words, and not upon the man who uttered them. It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are.

Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home—it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it.

that man always had been off in his own boat on some branch of the river no one else ever rowed on.

I had to own that I admired her for listening to her own heart rather than having her life ruled by others' conventions.

training to be a

He turned his eyes on me then, and spoke to me in a silken whisper that seemed to fall upon my grief like a comforting shawl.

All at once, the voices began: some in slurred murmurs, some crying out loudly upon the Lord, others weeping and beating their breasts. At that time, you see, we all of us believed that God listened to such prayers.

The priest Zadok looked stricken. He had hoped to bargain information for a higher price. Now I, as a prophet, had given it to David for free.

the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor.

Of course it is. How do you think artists become known? Critics, dealers—they are the people who develop the public taste. Without them, we starve.

Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause.

value of face time: never write a memo if you can make a phone call, never make a phone call if you can meet in person.

Do not mind my rough old tongue. I have grown too bent with age for any further bowing.

She felt a little clandestine, as if she were ten years old again, sneaking a dead rat past her mother so she could articulate a Rattus norvegicus domestica for her bedroom display.

David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.

one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

His tenuously held scruples about the slave economy did not stop him from briefly musing whether he should have himself bid for Abe Hawkins.

He leaned into Darley's flank and felt the horse respond with gentle acceptance. Only horses were honest, in the end.

The translucent skin rattled softly in the hot wind. Maybe this season was his shedding. He closed his sore hand around another bole and stuffed it in his sack. He resolved that he would make it so. He would leave the boy behind, discarded in the dust of this damnable field. He didn't know how, but he had to find a way. He would go on in the world as a man.