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9fe0a64
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For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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887e2b4
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To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
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mind
reading
tastes
insight
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Geraldine Brooks |
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2868a88
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A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e307481
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You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
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perseverance
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Geraldine Brooks |
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ad99a61
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God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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0107d60
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She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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7ec8561
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I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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53f3757
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The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361
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inspirational
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Geraldine Brooks |
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47c2e30
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I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with. The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant wo..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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2f3dbd7
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I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust - the tightening of the throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite - is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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921ddc9
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If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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17eca41
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My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many ..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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78c8c4d
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We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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40244c1
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Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a87faab
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These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d2ea5cc
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They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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084fc7a
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It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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0a3c3bd
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How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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344a82a
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It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.
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pain
youth
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Geraldine Brooks |
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620fa3e
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Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
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fear
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6096d94
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I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin?"
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Geraldine Brooks |
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29daf6a
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Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home - it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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caa1503
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I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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55bbb05
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The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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47a217b
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He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing 'meek' with 'weak.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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3449614
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Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
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inspirational
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6a7e0ed
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I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e9ddaee
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I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way...
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Geraldine Brooks |
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1cf3ba9
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The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a58080f
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I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c7ae448
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the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.
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depression
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Geraldine Brooks |
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f78b955
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adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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61767ce
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Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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440c21f
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You," he continued, grabbing my wrist. "All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and mad..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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5c396ab
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It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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bb6e950
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No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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2e2f7c3
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While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6c272aa
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I recognized the tokens of the time, because I had lived through just such another uneasy season, when every day was tainted by the foul breath of a fear that could not be faced forthrightly, yet could not be ignored.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c57aab4
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Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d542d27
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She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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96c7667
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She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed.
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witty-rebuke
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Geraldine Brooks |
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aac2974
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He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words--sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place--cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing ..
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names
nature
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Geraldine Brooks |
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fc6cf67
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I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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354f7a1
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the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve." Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257"
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Geraldine Brooks |