Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

Sep-11 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.

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

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.

These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.

I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust - the tightening of the throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite - is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books.

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.

He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing 'meek' with 'weak.

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.