Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. "

Geraldine Brooks

Related Quotes:

" Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know. "

Geraldine Brooks

" One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time. "

Geraldine Brooks

" I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. "

Geraldine Brooks

" I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school. "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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