Quotes from Geraldine Brooks

The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The

The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,

Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn't instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If

Hard to say the right thing, these days.

It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn't wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand.

Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,

finding success. It leads to unpleasantness that I would rather . . . avoid. Even the greatest jockeys, the men everyone delighted to cheer for, cannot now get a decent mount, South or North. And if they do chance to ride, it has become perilous. The White jockeys collaborate against them to provoke falls.

It is this notion of women's barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel

We're seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families' incomes are falling and girls' schooling is the first place they economize," she sighed. The

It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid...

But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.

This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

West Bank women's groups argued that the time wasn't right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women's rights could be raised. The

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.

the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against "honor" killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls.

And he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader.

The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.

This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.

What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.