Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Geraldine Brooks

From "Caleb's Crossing"--This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers. "Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul t...

Geraldine Brooks

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?

Geraldine Brooks

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...

Geraldine Brooks

I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.

Geraldine Brooks

I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.

Geraldine Brooks

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in Engla...

Geraldine Brooks

I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.

Geraldine Brooks

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...

Geraldine Brooks

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

Geraldine Brooks

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.

Geraldine Brooks

Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee o...

Geraldine Brooks

I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the s...

Geraldine Brooks

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.

Geraldine Brooks

Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wi...

Geraldine Brooks

I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hand...

Geraldine Brooks

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

Geraldine Brooks

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

Geraldine Brooks

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African America...

Geraldine Brooks

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

Geraldine Brooks