Geraldine Brooks

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

— Geraldine Brooks

“She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

“They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid.”

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

“From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.”

— Geraldine Brooks

“Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.”

— Geraldine Brooks

“You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right.” A”

— Geraldine Brooks

“Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul…

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

“She’d been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.”

— Geraldine Brooks

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport…

— Geraldine Brooks

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort…

— Geraldine Brooks

'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen.…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve,…

— Geraldine Brooks

“Women of all ages are in-fantilized by the Saudi system. A woman, no matter how old, has to be able to show…

— Geraldine Brooks

“To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their…

— Geraldine Brooks

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is…

— Geraldine Brooks

“To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among…

— Geraldine Brooks

“Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for…

— Geraldine Brooks

Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake…

— Geraldine Brooks

“These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in…

— Geraldine Brooks

“asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to…

— Geraldine Brooks

I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me…

— Geraldine Brooks

“The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women’s academy. To…

— Geraldine Brooks

And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the…

— 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…

— 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,…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life’s injustices: that the man who has been wealthy…

— Geraldine Brooks

“He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes — warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays — and reflected on…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off…

— Geraldine Brooks

“I have now traveled so far south that I find myself come to a place where our common expression “white as snow”…

— Geraldine Brooks

“[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the…

— Geraldine Brooks