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625fced
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Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn't instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6e89f8a
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Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss--that means to send someone up, make fun of them.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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1e1b398
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It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e771bee
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It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid..."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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fb5eb76
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But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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3d56616
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There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men. --Heinrich Heine
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Geraldine Brooks |
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125a9fa
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From "Caleb's Crossing"--This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn't apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers. "Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me."
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eileen-granfors
family
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Geraldine Brooks |
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97d1995
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This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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f90e118
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It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. I can figure out who they were, or how they worked.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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fb315d6
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I do not ask for your abosolution. I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to so the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way. That, at least, has been my path
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d3cccfc
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And yet what manner of man would I be, who has so much to say in the contest of words, if now I shirked this contest of blood?
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b6dc458
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His spirit is like a guttering candle
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Geraldine Brooks |
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701f6e4
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I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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0235d73
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I had little wish to recall the callow peddler who would turn over any dank stone in his quest for knowledge.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b934b77
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The island. As I tally my losses, it figures large there. If God takes a beloved one unto himself, we feel that loss in our heart. Yet we know well enough that nowt will quicken the dead, and so we must strive to be reconciled. But the island--its briny air, its ever changing light--these things yet exist. There, the clean and glassy breakers still beat upon the sands, the clay cliffs still flare russet and purple each sunset. All of this g..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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53a9304
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The island cried out to me. I longed to feast my senses on its light and air, and restore my spirit with its peace. If I answered its call, soon enough I would live again in the familiar rhythms of its seasons--the wincing winters and dappled summers, its shy, reluctant springtide and gleaming, bronzed leaf fall.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c4ef88e
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For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts--great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b92392b
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All this is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was--the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan's warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6241450
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Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her.
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herbalist
naturalism
year-of-wonders
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Geraldine Brooks |
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be5ff7f
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And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the author of it all? The appetites we have all come from Him; they have been with us since Eden. If we slip and fall, He understands our weakness. Did not mighty King David lust, and was he not driven through his lust to do great wrong? And yet Go..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b70aeb5
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By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c9436d8
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Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought ..
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parenthood
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b37d316
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This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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02360db
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And he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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400ba80
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I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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62049b2
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It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d453059
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He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.
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maturation
seasoning
self-discipline
statecraft
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d3d6599
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When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss - which was his rage - and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.
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emotions
mental-illness
relationships
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Geraldine Brooks |
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cecb2a9
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As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people.
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defensiveness
fragmentation
leadership
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Geraldine Brooks |
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9b6fbc0
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One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind.
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music
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a709164
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He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.
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regeneration
renewal
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Geraldine Brooks |
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3fe5123
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In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
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materialism
self-discipline
spiritual-warfare
thought-wife
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e692c14
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It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
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preaching
prophecy
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Geraldine Brooks |
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7a30ec3
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I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.
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regeneration
renewal
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Geraldine Brooks |
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8a89b07
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The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The
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Geraldine Brooks |
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2783766
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But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do!
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a180b75
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The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,
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Geraldine Brooks |
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ab6a2e8
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It is this notion of women's barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a19d119
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You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah's child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that." "But I might have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead." "You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point." "Then what, pray, is the point?" His voice was a ..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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4774459
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Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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4248c2a
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the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against "honor" killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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df75be4
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What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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682e18a
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I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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cb08be9
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This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition--an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [...] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [...] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain comp..
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judaism
racism
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Geraldine Brooks |