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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. "
Geraldine Brooks
Words
I Can
Sometimes
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" 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
Yes
People
Me
" When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story. "
Geraldine Brooks
Nature
Writing
Human Nature
" There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work. "
Geraldine Brooks
Work
Past
Know
" I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right. "
Geraldine Brooks
Change
Right
Things
" 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. "
Geraldine Brooks
Courage
Stand Up
Say
" 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
Down
Home
School
" 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
You
Talk
Wise
" 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
Women
Faith
Family
" 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
Me
Think
Time
" 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
Time
Myself
Me
" We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. "
Geraldine Brooks
Animal
Elephants
Only
" 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
Head
Man
Working
" Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade. "
Geraldine Brooks
Push
Stop
True
" 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
Know
Story
Woman
" 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
Feet
Children
Done
" Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733. "
Geraldine Brooks
History
Live
Small
" 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? "
Geraldine Brooks
Self
Think
People
" The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere. "
Geraldine Brooks
You
Showing Up
Story
" 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
Violence
Empathy
Religion
" 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
Candle
Power
Light
" 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
Past
Think
Story
" 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
Shadow
Fear
Day
" 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
Heat
Cool
City
" 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
Reading
Way
Become
" 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
Personality
Mistake
Beautiful
" I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. "
Geraldine Brooks
Soldier
War
Without
" Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. "
Geraldine Brooks
New
Wine
Bread
" I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers. "
Geraldine Brooks
Book
Story
Me
" 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
Saturday
Sister
Us
" 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
Build
Find
Imagination