Quote

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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Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Knowing
Mindfulness
Asks
Atheist
Think
Praying
Thinking
Blessing
People
Habit
Listening
Siren
Trouble
Ambulance
Hear
Sirens

More quotes by 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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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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Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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?
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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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