247 Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it. - Bethia Mayfield

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.

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

One does not have to be a priest to be a man!

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.

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 face.

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.