Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

You," he continued, grabbing my wrist. "All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee.

And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other'--it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists...same old, same old.

I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin?

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.

I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way...

I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.

I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes.

It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.

The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.

the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.

Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward's talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.

If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell.

adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.

No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.

How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?

She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed.

I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book.

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.

the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve." Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257