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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 fiction

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

— Geraldine Brooks art

'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.

— Geraldine Brooks man

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 time

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 people

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.

— Geraldine Brooks dogs

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 people

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 time

Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.

— Geraldine Brooks lies

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

— Geraldine Brooks war

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.

— Geraldine Brooks books

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

— Geraldine Brooks prayer

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

— Geraldine Brooks faith

And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

— Geraldine Brooks man

Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?

— Geraldine Brooks time

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

— Geraldine Brooks war

I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.

— Geraldine Brooks self

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

— Geraldine Brooks words

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 life

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

— Geraldine Brooks light

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 man

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 love

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 people

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

— Geraldine Brooks you

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

— Geraldine Brooks truth

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