Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

I looked at Batsheva and suddenly felt as I had throughout that long night after I'd returned from Beit Lehem, when I sat up waiting for some stillborn vision. I knew now why I felt so ill that night. All through that vigil, he had been raping her. And I had let myself call it a seduction. As I looked at her now, I was shamed by my own thoughts. In a way, I, too, had violated her.

It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.

One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do.

Why was she in such a rush to tell him that?

Was she hitting on him? He

Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse

I have lived most of my life in soldiers' camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.

does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman

Every Jew, and every converso, knew that the Inquisition was as much about filling the royal purse as purifying the Spanish church. For payment of a rapacious fine, most prisoners could walk—or hobble, or be borne on a litter, depending on how long they had been held—from the doors of the Casa Santa.

This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky.

Very frank about his many seductions. But also he writes a great deal on the rise of the Judenfressers—that means Jew Eaters, because the term anti-Semitism was not yet coined when he was a boy. Schnitzler was Jewish, of course.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think

My life, this is," she said. "I know every mark on this and how it came there. I know the heft of every blessed knife in here. And now I'm to turn me back and walk away with nothing.

To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.

But the stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. They pull life from whatever surfaces they cling to, while the roots, maybe, wither and rot until you cannot find the place from which the seed of the vine has truly sprung. That was my task: to uncover those earliest roots. And he had directed me to the seedbed.

I've inherited a core belief, to wit: don't rely on some other sod for your emotional sustenance. Find something absorbing to do—something so absorbing that you don't have time to dwell on the woe-is-me stuff.

women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To

Later, when he was able to grasp it between shaking hands and pour a trickle into his mouth, the pain of swallowing made him pass out again. In his dreams, he was once again bound on the sloping ladder, the water cascading into his mouth, his own involuntary swallowing pulling the narrow length of linen farther and farther into his gut.

Still, he could see how a man like Scott might get confused at a place like the Meadows. Life looked well enough there. It was what you couldn't see that rubbed your soul raw.

It was as if a deep fog had settled on me and everything around me, and I groped my way from one chore to the next without really seeing anything clearly.

It wasn't his job to enlighten White people about their own racism.

The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women's sexuality—both the fear of a "past" and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil.

I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.

But he's not known for taking on apprentices.