Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

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." I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description.

I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others.

Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life.

In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honour from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically subhuman and dishonourable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult.

Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites' worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place…full of faeces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men's semen.

The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters.

It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearteed, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing "meek" with "weak.

Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.

At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.

Well, they say trauma etches the neurons, and I was traumatized by my appalling behavior." Typical, Theo thought. He'd been accused, yet she was traumatized.

Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father's nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor

A man's thoughts and the ability to express them come from God, and if my words find favor, may it be to his honor.

The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment.

I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.

Nothing illegal. Just the business itself—racing horses before they should even be ridden, wrecking their bones before they've finished growing.

One does not have to be a priest to be a man!

But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky.

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.

Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.

We cannot know the future, nor can we change it,...It is best to be realistic about such things. But we have the time we have been given. So let us treasure it while we can.

It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

But every time I had the opportunity, I lacked the will.