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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2c5ae4b | But we'll never again be so young ... Or don't you like dancing? | Hermann Hesse | ||
| fef825c | kl khTyy'@ tHml fy Tyth n`mth | Hermann Hesse | ||
| c63da2f | Is it ever thus, at the end of things? 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? | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| be790c7 | When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing masses of the damned, among whom I must expect to spend eternity. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 301da38 | To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God. . . . It is what we must strive for. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d14111a | 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 made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee." I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description." | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8288711 | How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| e409641 | I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 2acbfce | I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hands float out to touch each other, fingertip to fingertip. In a day, two days, they will glide on, a funeral flotilla, past the unfinished white dome rising out of its scaffolds on a muddy hill in.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8f377a3 | Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose. She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| c8fdadd | At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift. | leisure | Geraldine Brooks | |
| cd62e28 | The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment. Pg 163 | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 50f1fa1 | All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy f.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 171c2d0 | One does not have to be a priest to be a man! | inspirational | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 8e0901e | The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 6058c56 | My mother was an excellent woman. Pious, virtuous. Kind. But she was not the intellectual equal of my father. Not by any means. I do not speak of book learning. I speak of a certain innate quality of mind, a superior understanding. Because she had it not, their companionship was - diminished. Father looked to his books, rather than to his wife. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a874c3c | When she thought of the letter beit, it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. 'They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.' In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy. | transcendence words | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 3f52563 | Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 3720408 | To believe, to act, and to have events confound you--I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong--how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8b11c29 | He did not turn. Embracing his sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the centre, where the ice was thin. His sister's head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 1c27dc9 | Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| bc4cd6e | In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honour from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically subhuman and dishonourable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 7d156f8 | The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8072b66 | It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearteed, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing "meek" with "weak." | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d74202c | Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 15dd17e | You know that your church has always taken a view on these matters very different from ours, from the day that the first printing press was assembled. Your church did not want your holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avokat ha kodesh, a holy work. Some rabbis even likened the press to an altar. We call it 'writing with many pens' and saw it as furthering the spread of the word that be.. | christianity judaism | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 7bb21d9 | The Wampanoag, in ways which are not plain to me, in concert decided upon their own observance of father's passing. They marked it in a most singular manner. As soon as father's loss became known to them, each one, when traveling up or down the island, would fetch from the shore a smooth white stone such as can oft be found there. These they carried until they passed the place where father had taken farewell of them. There they deposited th.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4f10f18 | And yet [Tequamuck] refuses to see that God prospers you, and protects you, and keeps from you the sicknesses against which his powers are as nothing. So, this do I see: We must find favor with your God, or die. That, Storm Eyes, is why I came to your father." His expression was grim. I wanted to reach for his hand, offer some comfort. But I did not. I just sat there, wordless, until he spoke again. "Life is better than death. I know this. .. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 15a619e | Some would say it was a pact with the devil, and therefore I am not bound by it. But after that day I was no longer certain that Tequamuck was Satan's servant. To be sure, father and every other minister in my lifetime has warned that Satan is guileful and adept at concealing his true purpose. But since that day I have come to believe that it is not for us to know the subtle mind of God. It may be, as Caleb thought, that Satan is God's ange.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 6baec86 | How should I worship your God, no matter how powerful, when I know what he will allow to befall us? Who would follow such a cruel god? And how should I lay aside the spirits by whose aid I have roiled the sea and riven rock, who for long years gifted me the power to cure the sick and to inflame my enemies' blood? To begloom the bright day and set dim night ablaze? All this, my spirits have allowed to me. Your God may be stronger than these;.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a41c4b3 | The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story. | religion | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 5bd06f9 | Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral. | time | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 7692778 | Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental. | work worship | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 535849d | I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| e0e27fc | You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8a5f661 | Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. And so distant, up there in the sky. I do not have to look so far. I can see my skygod clear enough, right there,' he said, stretching out an arm towards the sun. 'By day Keesakand. Tonight Nanpawshat, moon god, will take his place. And there will be Potanit, god of the fire....' He prattled on, cataloguing his pantheon of heathenish ido.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 0c03072 | A woman had thrown her own babe down a well. When she was brought to answer for the murder, she said that one great good had come of her evil act. At last, she said, she was free of the uncertainty that had plagued her every waking thought: was she numbered among the damned or the saved? Her whole life had been bent about that question. Finally, she knew. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 50c9c70 | I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone's gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left. | love | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| 397bdc3 | Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied? | writing | James Hamilton-Paterson | |
| 8a50d4a | There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone. | Dale Peck | ||
| af2a99c | even I could not guess what misgivings lay behind Perrin's clear eyes. Perhaps none; perhaps he trusted Laurel without question. Perhaps he was right. All I knew is what Laurel's hands said when she spoke Corbet's name. And how often she said it, until it seemed, like the falling of autumn leaves, or the long ribbons of migrating birds, one of the season's changes. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| d4b29f1 | Morgan," he whispered, "I wish you had not been someone I loved so." | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| af769f7 | Above us hung a tapestry of silver and gold and palest green that in my world had faded into white: a great oak so entwined with ivy it had died, its bare branches pushing through the leaves like bone. I stared at the roses, wanting to hold my hands to such red, but like the light, they burned cold. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| e4f1ec2 | The river narrowed, quickened, its surface trembling like the eyes of dreamers. | Patricia A. McKillip |