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

Geraldine Brooks

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. "

Geraldine Brooks

" Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?' "

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

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

Geraldine Brooks

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

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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage. "

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

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

Geraldine Brooks

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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