Geraldine Brooks quotes

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian journalist and author, widely recognized for her works of literary fiction and non-fiction. Her career began as a foreign correspondent, covering events in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans for major publications. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for her insightful storytelling and exploration of historical themes. Here are 60 of her quotes:

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

Geraldine Brooks

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

Geraldine Brooks

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

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

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'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

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.

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

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.

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 think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.

Geraldine Brooks

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

Geraldine Brooks

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.

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

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.

Geraldine Brooks

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

Geraldine Brooks

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

Geraldine Brooks

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

Geraldine Brooks

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

Geraldine Brooks

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

Geraldine Brooks

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

Geraldine Brooks

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Geraldine Brooks