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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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Geraldine Brooks
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 14
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Clean
Vision
Scour
Literature
Conjured
Book
Macbeth
Without
Filthy
Sometimes
Visions
Mind
Burning
Would
Mental

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I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
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The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.
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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.
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A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
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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 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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You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
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They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
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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.
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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.
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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