Top 45 Geraldine Brooks Quotes

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.

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

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.

You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I’m very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

I’m a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one’s listening. I think it’s just a habit of mindfulness.

My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.

I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn’t even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That’s not shy, that’s wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist’s notebook in your hand it wasn’t really you, you see.

When you’re writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can’t go. You can’t suppose. You can’t imagine. And I think there’s something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.

So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh… And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be bloody lucky!’ So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia.

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things – the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.

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

Yes, it seems we’ve got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It’s really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, ‘Oh, the other, get them out of here.’

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I’m not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it’s because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it’s just that I find the present too confounding.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it’s words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I’d get it and I’d generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school.

I loved being away from school. I didn’t really fancy school that much when I was little; it wasn’t until I was in third or fourth grade that I really settled down at school and I was much happier at home with my mum and she was very creative and sort of fostered all my interests.

There’s just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can’t know it all, and that’s where imagination can work.

I think I’m still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes – war, uprising, famine, refugee crises – and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without ‘The Illiad?’ How to do without ‘Macbeth?’

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

The structure of ‘March’ was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ plotline.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, ‘chief,’ I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man’s headgear.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

The Sarajevans have a very particular world view – a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and… truckloads of guts, you know.

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

I’m very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use – what do they call those things? – composite characters. I don’t think that’s right.

One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it’s the easiest you’ll ever do. ‘Cause the drama’s everywhere.

Certainly I’m still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it’s no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, ‘I’ll just see if there’s anything there.’ So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became ‘Year of Wonders,’ and lucky for me it found its readers.

If somebody from the past doesn’t rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven’t got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act – and that starts the plot in motion.

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves’ fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

And one of the things that I learned was you can’t generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can’t think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn’t for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.