Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

Book

Hands

Mind

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.

Hands

Running

Supernatural Forces

And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can save us as a species. A species that will continue to find comfort and delight in the companionship of animals, the miracle of birds, the colours of the corals and the majesty of the forests. We are in it together, on this blue spinning marble in the cold and silent void. And we must act on that belief, if we are going to be able to continue to live a good life here, in this beautiful and fragile country, on this lovely planet, our only home.

Beautiful

Country

Good Life

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.

Doctors

Hair

Thinking

And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

Giving

Happens

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.

Children

Israel

Thinking

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.

Light

Writing

Years

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.

Believe

Psych

Who We Are

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?

People

Self

Thinking

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

Caverns

Despair

Feet

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Age

Alive

Ambition

Animal

Art

Attitude

Beautiful

Believe

Book

Cancer

Caverns

Certainty

Children

Choices

Class

Clear

Country

Day Of Rest

Despair

Doctors

Dog

Doubt

Down And

Edges

Elephants

Empathy

Fear

Feet

Fiction

Four

Giving

Good Life

Hair

Hands

Happens

Heart

Home

Ideas

Imagination

Israel

Leadership

Light

Lord

Love You

Manners

Memories

Men

Mind

Months

Moon

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Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

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.

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?

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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