List of Geraldine Brooks Quotes

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.

I Was Really Interested In How Marriages Work, How You Can, You Know, Be In Love With Somebody And Spend Many Years With Your Lives Intertwined, But In The End Another Soul Can Be Fundamentally Unknowable. And I Think That The Stress Of War, When One Party Goes Away And The Other Has To Deal At Home, Is A Really Testing Time In A Lot Of Marriages.

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?

I Think That You Can Honour The Sacrifices Of A Common Soldier Without Glorifying War.

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.

For Most People, Chemotherapy Is No Longer The Chamber Of Horrors We Often Conceive It To Be. Yes, It Is An Ordeal For Some People, But It Wasn't For Me, Nor For Most Of The Patients I Got To Know During My Four Months Of Periodic Visits To The Chemo Suite.

When I Write A Word In English, A Simple One, Such As, Say, 'chief,' I Have Unwittingly Ushered A Querulous Horde Into The Room. The Roman Legionary Is There, Shaking His 'cap,' Or Head, And Al Cap Is There, Slouching In His Signature Working Man's Headgear.

I Borrowed His Brightness And Used It To See My Way, And Then Gradually, From The Habit Of Looking At The World As He Illuminated It, The Light In My Own Mind Rekindled.

Even The Classics That We Read To Our Young Children Are Full Of Wolves' Fangs And Burning Ovens And Bloody Feet And Ice Shards Piercing Hearts. Even The New Testament Climaxes With An Act Of Unspeakable Torture. Might As Well Just Read To Our Kids From The Amnesty Annual Report And Be Done With It.

And So, As Generally Happens, Those Who Have Most Give Least, And Those With Less Somehow Make Shrift To Share.

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.

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.