Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Say
Lost
Know
" 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
My Life
Process
Sea
" Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. "
Geraldine Brooks
Truth
Own
Moral
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. "
Geraldine Brooks
Soldier
War
Without
" 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
" 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 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
" Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. "
Geraldine Brooks
House
Deal
Words
" 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
" My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal. "
Geraldine Brooks
Very
Your
Kind
" 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
Want
Book
Literature