Quote

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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Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Every
Dad
Signatures
Something
Pass
Mum
Would
Reader
Card
Books
Saturday
Morning
Readers
Book
Sister
Come
Cards
Great
Library
Signature

More quotes by 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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...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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I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the first that didn't need to. By the 1980's when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions.
Geraldine Brooks
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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
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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
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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?
Geraldine Brooks
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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.
Geraldine Brooks
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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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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 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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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.
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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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.
Geraldine Brooks
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They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
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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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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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.
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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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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Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
Geraldine Brooks