247 Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

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.

It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.

My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute,” said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.

What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

But how would we repay the kindness of those who received us, if we carried the seeds of the Plague to them? What burden would we bear if, because of us, hundreds die who might have lived?

I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It’s the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as “Massholes.

They say the Lord’s Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this is the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong.

For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts – great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.