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
Something
Pass
Mum
Would
Reader
Card
Books
Saturday
Morning
Readers
Book
Sister
Come
Cards
Great
Library
Signature
Every
Dad
Signatures

More quotes by Geraldine Brooks

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A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
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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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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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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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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Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
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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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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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.
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?
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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'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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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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And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.
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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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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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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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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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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Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
Geraldine Brooks