Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. "
Geraldine Brooks
Truth
Own
Moral
Related Quotes:
" 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
Time
Believe
Change
" 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
Listening
People
Hear
" 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
Down
Flight
Place
" 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
" 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
" 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
Kid
Going
Time
" 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
" Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. "
Geraldine Brooks
House
Deal
Words
" 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
" 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
Time
Age
Breast Cancer
" 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
" 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
She
Past
Me
" My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal. "
Geraldine Brooks
Very
Your
Kind
" If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary. "
Geraldine Brooks
You
Extraordinary
Look
" 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 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
Going
Newspaper
Printing
" 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
" 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
" 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
Writing
Time
Story
" 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
" 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
" 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
" If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon. "
Geraldine Brooks
Down
Character
Cancer
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline. "
Geraldine Brooks
Women
Character
Down
" 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
" 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
" 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