Quote

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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Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Particularly
Emerging
Cancer
Adolescence
Afraid
Breast
Age
Suspect
Idea
Suspects
Women
Breasts
Disfigurement
Ideas
Central
Horrifying
Time
Sexuality
Preoccupation

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
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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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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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.
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Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
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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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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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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My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.
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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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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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
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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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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