Quote

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.

Geraldine Brooks

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Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Courage
Called
Gone
Demonstrate
Upon
Heroism
Lives
Revealed
Might
September
Never
Extent
People
Ordinary

More quotes by Geraldine Brooks

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Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
Geraldine Brooks
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
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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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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'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
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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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We are not the only animal that mourns apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Geraldine Brooks
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The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.
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