247 Quotes by Geraldine Brooks

To believe, to act, and to have events confound you – I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong – how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.

I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

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.

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.

I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one – this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.

Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward’s talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.

I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming.

In the heir’s world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.