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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| aa62839 | I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole. | perspective prayer prophecy sovereignty-of-god word-of-god | Geraldine Brooks | |
| b9da148 | He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that? | servant-leadership | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 8bbf018 | I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom. | legacy patriotism personality | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 3b1080a | If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns. | heritage leadership statecraft | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 2fb2460 | Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything. | distraction exposition preaching priorities prophecy | Geraldine Brooks | |
| d11bfe3 | You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat. | discipleship ministry provision | Geraldine Brooks | |
| d3285f1 | We will need to give you a Muslim name...does Leila suit you?" "I don't deserve this kindness," she whispered. "That you, Muslims, should help a Jew--" "Come now!" Serif said, realizing that she was about to cry. "Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham. Your new name, do you know it means 'evening' both in Arabic, the language of our Holy Koran, and also in Hebrew, the language of your Torah?" -- | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| c0c599d | At first, Lola was a little afraid of Serif, who was almost as old as her father. But his gentle, courtly manners soon put her at her ease. For a while, she couldn't say what it was about him that was so different from other people she had known. And then one day, as he patiently drew her out on some subject or another, listening to her opinion as if it were worthy of his consideration, and then guiding her subtly to a fuller view of the is.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 391b5df | 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. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 17e646d | The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| bcfc646 | when every day was tainted by the foul breath of a fear that could not be faced forthrightly, yet could not be ignored. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| b392ad7 | But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| f025bf5 | How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that know.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| b68b5dc | Sometimes, I think if you took all the universities and all the hospitals out of greater Boston, you'd be able to fit what's left into about six city blocks | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| f3b6e97 | But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky. | praying religion sadness | Geraldine Brooks | |
| ae4bc66 | Sera que existem duas palavras mais intimamente relacionadas que coragem e covardia? Penso que nao existe um homem que nao queira possuir a primeira, mas tema ser acusado da segunda. Enquanto uma e considerada o apogeu do carater de um individuo, a outra pode ser vista como o seu nadir. E, no entanto, a meu ver, as duas ocupam posicoes paralelas no circulo da vida, afastadas uma da outra pelo mero grau de um arco. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| fef62fe | Dentre meus novos deveres, tinha certeza, finalmente nenhum seria indigno de ser narrado a minha mulher. Por fim, eu me encarregaria de um trabalho cujo objetivo era melhorar a vida, em vez de assistir a seu fim. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 826b693 | From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places--Cairo, Damascus--not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmelted snow gathered in the crotch between the mosque's dome and its stone palisade. 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 bri.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a5b8638 | A short distance away, just outside the town of Harvard, Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands dream lives on in a way he could not have imagined, as an intriguing museum and a place of exceptional beauty. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| fddd2b5 | Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| c47db98 | Very frank about his many seductions. But also he writes a great deal on the rise of the Judenfressers--that means Jew Eaters, because the term anti-Semitism was not yet coined when he was a boy. Schnitzler was Jewish, of course. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 59ac21c | 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. And yet I do not think | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 1241f15 | To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 6334a29 | But the stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. They pull life from whatever surfaces they cling to, while the roots, maybe, wither and rot until you cannot find the place from which the seed of the vine has truly sprung. That was my task: to uncover those earliest roots. And he had directed me to the seedbed. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8fe76d2 | Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer--a scribe of God's holy languages--made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 8ed8136 | Sarai was a lovely woman still, and even after two dozen years he could grow hard if she looked at him a certain way. Sometimes, he wondered about Vistorini, and how he could live a life without a woman's warmth in his bed. Or children. What would it be, to miss the sight of them, sweet-faced infants growing, changing, year by year, finding their paths to an honorable maturity? He wondered if the wine his friend drank so excessively was a w.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d38850e | To the contrary, he knew the ascetic beauty of such a way of being. He lived every moment mindful of the 613 commandments of the Torah. It was natural to him to separate the milk from the meat, to refrain from labor on the Sabbath, to abide by the laws of family purity in his relations with his wife. The disciplines of that monthly abstinence had only sharpened desire and sweetened their reunion. But to be without a wife entirely...that, to.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 090a6eb | Aryeh looked, and his head became light. How could he have not seen? The earth on which the Almighty created the plants and the animals--in each and every illumination, it was shown as an orb. That the earth was round, and not flat, was now the opinion of a majority of theologians. Interesting that this artist of a century earlier, when Christians were being sent to the stake for this belief, espoused it. But that, alone, would not condemn .. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 3b96077 | Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other'--it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists...same old, sam.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 9f586c4 | But now I could not gainsay the images of him, his silvered hair stained with blood and pale gray tissue, a bubble of crimsoned spittle forming on his lips as he tried to mouth the words of his last prayer. His eyes, his desperate eyes, searching my face as the Berber held me, the arm across my throat hard and wide as a tree branch. Somehow, I struggled free of that grip just long enough to shout the words for my father, the words that he n.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4aff529 | The angels enter not into a house where there is a dog or a likeness'--are those not the words of our Prophet? | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 29ca065 | For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root ngd, "to tell," and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This "telling" varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration... | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 812962e | What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned his back on a great opportunity to do good in the world.... And ever since the prince's shocking death, Vienna had been in almost imperceptible decline--a decline of mood rather than matter. But with no liberal face left in the Hofburg to stare .. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 3fab1e7 | Who would have thought that a single suicide--or a double suicide, more properly--could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted with some flourish--like the young woman who had decked herself in full bridal regalia before flinging herself from a speeding train, or the circus artist who, in the midst of his performance, had cast away his pole and leaped from the high wir.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 22e2764 | Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| b519038 | A sofer must fill his mind with only the holy letters. He could not be distracted by daily things. "Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach," he whispered to himself again, trying to quiet his mind. His hand formed the letter shin-- the letter of reason. What reason could there be in this constant fighting with the Moors? Had not the Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared these lands in contentment--in convivencia--for hundreds of years? What was.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 7478068 | This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d03d562 | who they were, or how they worked. That's how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge. It's what I love best about what I do. And there were so many | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 132db29 | It was a lengthy text, setting out the perfidies of the Jews and the insufficiency of measures so far taken to stop their corruption of Christian belief. "Therefore we command...all Jews and Jewesses, of whatever age they may be, that live, reside, and dwell in our said kingdoms and dominions...by the end of the month of July next, of the present year 1492, they depart from our said kingdoms...and that they not presume to return to, or resi.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4c96114 | When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of the curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless infant tight against her breast, until she stood waist-deep. She unwrapped him, throwing the swaddling cloth over her head. His brown eyes blinked at her, and his small fists, free of constriction, punched at the air. "Sorry, my little one," she said gently, and then thrust him under the dark surface. The water c.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 0b166b5 | Every Jew, and every converso, knew that the Inquisition was as much about filling the royal purse as purifying the Spanish church. For payment of a rapacious fine, most prisoners could walk--or hobble, or be borne on a litter, depending on how long they had been held--from the doors of the Casa Santa. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| e7506f5 | The king and queen are preparing an expulsion order--" David sucked in his breath. "Yes, even as we have feared. They have taken the capitulation of Granada as a sign of divine will that Spain be a Christian country. It is, then, their intention to thank God for their victory by declaring Spain a land where no Jew may remain. The choice is to convert, or depart. They have hatched this plan in secret, but finally the queen has confided it to.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d36a007 | All women's lives are like that, I told myself, as I climbed the stair that led to the better-appointed rooms of the king's house. Which of them ever is mistress of her own destiny? Highborn or peasant, it makes no difference. At least David hadn't had her flogged or killed, as another king might have done. But now that I had heard the tale of her life in her own words, my heart ached for her. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4f468a6 | art | Geraldine Brooks |