Quote

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.

Geraldine Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Always
Communal
Unites
Divides
Madness
Courage
Stand
Greater
Times

More quotes by Geraldine Brooks

Image
The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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
Image
I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as Massholes.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361
Geraldine Brooks
Image
We are not the only animal that mourns apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
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.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Geraldine Brooks
Image
'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.
Geraldine Brooks