Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.

That is the world as it is. If you do not like it, join me in attemping to change it.

We have grown older together, trapped in the aspic of our age gap.

Even the genteel ladies in the high stands opened their delicate throats and pierced the sky with their soprano squealing.

To have saved this small, singular one—this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.

A short distance away, just outside the town of Harvard, Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands dream lives on in a way he could not have imagined, as an intriguing museum and a place of exceptional beauty.

They were, all of them, lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true. Their mad conception of Mr. Lincoln as some kind of cloven-hoofed devil's scion, their complete disregard—denial—of the humanity of the enslaved, their fabulous notions of what evils the Federal government intended for them should their cause fail—all of it was ingrained so deep, beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue or evidence.

He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?

Marse Willa Viley

under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.

someone, walking in the white street, looked in at our window, he would have seen in the family tableau a simulacrum of domestic joy.

Want to be free? Course I do. But a soldier ain't free." He thought about May's husband, his shattered arm, his uncertain future. "I respect the men who joined your army, I do. But I've been taking orders all my life, and now I'm giving them.

Had not the Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared these lands in contentment—in convivencia—for hundreds of years? What was the saying? Christians raise the armies, Muslims raise the buildings, Jews raise the money.

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.

For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.

they knew that what they hoped for from the operation was to safeguard their daughters' chastity, because upon that chastity depended the honor of the girls' fathers and brothers.

month—the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.

I think the seeds of my love were planted there, in the ground that my father's madness harrowed.

she was the least princessy woman he'd ever been with: it didn't take her more than ten minutes to get dressed and out the door, a big contrast to some of the women he'd dated.

You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat.

a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. 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 great qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.

It was bitter cold, for the snow clouds had blown away, and the stars seemed mirrored in the icy glitter of the white-crusted fields.

Jess looked up. Was it possible he was hitting on her?