He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

— Geraldine Brooks

He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.

— Geraldine Brooks

He said that the music—its order and precision—helped him find the patterns in things—the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.

— Geraldine Brooks

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lamb skill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got legs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

— Geraldine Brooks

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.

— Geraldine Brooks

I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.

— Geraldine Brooks

I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.

— Geraldine Brooks

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

— Geraldine Brooks

I have lived most of my life in soldiers’ camps. I know what they saw. Furthermore, I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.

— Geraldine Brooks

I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.

— Geraldine Brooks