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

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

More quotes by Geraldine Brooks

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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
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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.
Geraldine Brooks
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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
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...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
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And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
Geraldine Brooks
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If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
Geraldine Brooks
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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?
Geraldine Brooks
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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
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Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
Geraldine Brooks
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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
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Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
Geraldine Brooks
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Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
Geraldine Brooks
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My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.
Geraldine Brooks
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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.
Geraldine Brooks
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We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
Geraldine Brooks
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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
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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.
Geraldine Brooks
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How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.
Geraldine Brooks
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I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
Geraldine Brooks
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Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
Geraldine Brooks