Quotes by Geraldine Brooks - Page 2

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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Sister
Dad
Morning
Book
Mum
Saturday
Saturday Morning
Morning Great Dad
Books
Card
Pass
Readers
Signature
Copy 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 / Journalist
Age
Adolescence
Breast Cancer
Cancer
Emerging
Ideas
Preoccupation
Sexuality
Women Are
Time Women Age
Central
Horrifying
Suspect
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Airports
Hate
Squares
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Baroque
Mother
Rights
Social Justice
Years
Catholics
Elaborate
Full-On
Madly
Tribe
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Imagination
Factual
Fiction
Historical
Historical Fiction
Scaffolding
Structure
Build
Me Find Never
Sure
As Far As
Attracts
Far
Fills
Record
Letting
Taking
Using
Copy Quote
I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Notebook
Wise
Cross
Relatives
Strangers
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Capacity
Driving
Driving Force
Empathy
Past
Writing
Fundamental
Ignore
Societies
Copy Quote
It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Borders
Good Luck
Latin
Luck
Promiscuous
Arabic
German
French
Countless
Tongues
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Attempting
Candle
Circumstances
Light
Writing
Years
African
Any Circumstances
Reporter
Longhand
Newspaper
Newspaper Reporter
Villages
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Believe
Phrases
Reading
Turns
Usage
Austere
Finer
Journals
Lately
Phrase
Copy Quote
So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh... And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, 'Oh, that'll be bloody lucky!' So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Adopting
Bloody
Ethiopia
Due
Ended
First Child
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Chamber
Chemotherapy
Four
Months
People
Me People Know
Conceive
Horrors
Ordeal
Patients
Periodic
Suite
Visits
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Men
Simple
Writing
Copy Quote
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 Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Shaking
Andy
Cap
Chief
Roman
Signature
Copy Quote
'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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Afternoon
America
Australian
Computer
Computer Screen
Icons
Mail
Online
Postman
Stillness
Waiting
Years
Whistle
Old
Flag
Icon
Screen
Second
Slice
Waves
Copy Quote
...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
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Catholic
People
Tests
Copy Quote
If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Plot
Rise
Grave
Motion
Narrator
Copy Quote
I loved being away from school. I didn't really fancy school that much when I was little; it wasn't until I was in third or fourth grade that I really settled down at school and I was much happier at home with my mum and she was very creative and sort of fostered all my interests.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Fancy
Fourth
Mum
Fostered
Grade
Interests
Settled
Third
Copy Quote
I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Distracted
Forty
Plunge
Chain
Desk
Dogs
Door
Front Door
Go Home
Copy Quote
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Affected
Chewing
Covering
Famine
Lessons
Narrative
Refugee
Uprising
Bear
Correspondent
Crises
Dire
Foreign
Witnessing
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Kids
Amnesty
Bloody
Burning
Children
Feet
Heart
Ice
New Testament
Testament
Torture
Unspeakable
Young Children
Annual
Report
Classics
Hearts
Piercing
Wolves
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Babe
Doctors
Hair
Thinking
Unbelievable
Doctor
Confound
Diplomat
Veil
Waist
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Art
Home
Ambition
Copy Quote
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Contemporary
Former
Journalist
Nonfiction
Reality
Thinking
Writing
Love Time Reality
Drawn
Inhibited
Narratives
Press
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Beautiful
Mistake
Personality
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Flipped
Human Personality
Mistake
Multicultural
Seems
Susceptible
Build
Again
Allow
Gene
Goes
Mutant
Switch
Yes
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Believe
Psych
Who We Are
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Fire
Flight
Hands
Somalia
Thinking
Episode
Everybody Else
Hawk
Pinned
Copy Quote
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Balkans
East
Equipment
Middle East
Acquired
Africa
Correspondent
Desk
Reporter
Copy Quote
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Middle East
Writing
Years
Copy Quote
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 / Journalist
Good Day
Simple
Sorry
Copy Quote
Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Air
Cities
Heat
Metropolis
Multicultural
Sleep
Sydney
Thunderstorm
Waiting
Western
Buster
Evenings
Exuberant
Gathered
Passed
Copy Quote
I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Autonomy
Compatible
Covering
Infant
Journalism
Spoiled
Time Myself Me
Tremendous
Correspondent
Editor
Gotten
Rearing
Tremendous Amount
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Children
Israel
Thinking
Bought
Crying
Reporter
Jews
Palestinians
Same Things
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
War
Party
Stress
Copy Quote
Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table, making sure everybody's socks match, the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists, but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon, who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Art
Real
Soccer
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Running
Hands
Rushing
Supernatural Forces
Copy Quote
Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Believe
Emotional
Writing
Copy Quote
It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Believe
Love You
Memories
Copy Quote
What's wrong with leading the way? We've played that role before, after all. We gave the world the secret ballot... that did so much to raise living standards and improve conditions for workers worldwide. We were a leader in extending to women the right to vote. We were barely a nation when we set the bar for bravery and sacrifice by common soldiers in foreign wars. We grew up out of racism and misogyny and homophobia to become a mostly tolerant, successful multicultural society. We did these great things because we know we are in it together. It is our core value as Australians.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Leadership
War
Successful
Copy Quote
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.
Geraldine Brooks / Journalist
Beautiful
Country
Good Life
Copy Quote

Related Journalist Authors

Zoë Heller
Journalist
Wednesday, Jul 07, 1965
Yvan Audouard
Journalist
Friday, Feb 27, 1914
Sunday, Mar 21, 2004
Yuri Bezmenov
Journalist
Yoshiko Sakurai
Journalist
Wednesday, Oct 10, 1945
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Journalist
Saturday, Dec 10, 1949
Yang Lan
Journalist
Sunday, Mar 31, 1968
Yahtzee Croshaw
Journalist
Tuesday, May 24, 1983
Xinran
Journalist
Ximenes Doudan
Journalist
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas
Journalist
Saturday, Aug 15, 1908
Wednesday, Feb 04, 1987
Wolf Blitzer
Journalist
Monday, Mar 22, 1948
William Seabrook
Journalist
Friday, Feb 22, 1884
Thursday, Sep 20, 1945
William Robertson Nicoll
Journalist
Friday, Oct 10, 1851
Friday, May 04, 1923
William Rees-Mogg
Journalist
Saturday, Jul 14, 1928
Saturday, Dec 29, 2012
William Pickens
Journalist
Saturday, Jan 15, 1881
Tuesday, Apr 06, 1954

View All Journalist Quotes

Top Authors

Charles Spurgeon
Preacher
Thursday, Jun 19, 1834
Sunday, Jan 31, 1892
Aldous Huxley
Writer
Thursday, Jul 26, 1894
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
Leonardo Da Vinci
Painter
Thursday, Apr 15, 1452
Friday, May 02, 1519
Deepak Chopra
Author
Wednesday, Oct 22, 1947
Theodore Roosevelt
26Th U.s. President
Wednesday, Oct 27, 1858
Monday, Jan 06, 1919
Francis Of Assisi
Saint
Thursday, Jun 24, 1182
Saturday, Oct 03, 1226
Napoleon Bonaparte
Military Commander
Tuesday, Aug 15, 1769
Saturday, May 05, 1821
John F. Kennedy
35Th U.s. President
Tuesday, May 29, 1917
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
Bob Marley
Singer
Tuesday, Feb 06, 1945
Monday, May 11, 1981
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Dr. Seuss
Writer
Wednesday, Mar 02, 1904
Tuesday, Sep 24, 1991
Carrie Fisher
Actress
Sunday, Oct 21, 1956
Tuesday, Dec 27, 2016
Oprah Winfrey
Media Proprietor
Friday, Jan 29, 1954
Thomas Aquinas
Priest
Tuesday, Jan 28, 1225
Wednesday, Mar 07, 1274
Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778

View All Authors

Geraldine Brooks Quotes - Page 2

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Journalist Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Journalist Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page