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
I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. – Geraldine Brooks
‘You’ve got mail!’ exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I’m 10 years old again, waiting for the postman’s whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh… And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be bloody lucky!’ So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia. – 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
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
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
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
My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I’m more your paragraph kind of gal. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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