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.

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Pele us on the beach, clinging to Thesis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.

— Geraldine Brooks

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

— Geraldine Brooks

It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along.... So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium and bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble" (pp. 345-346)

— Geraldine Brooks

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

— Geraldine Brooks

I thought it's best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.

— Geraldine Brooks

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.

— Geraldine Brooks

It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.

— Geraldine Brooks

It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.

— Geraldine Brooks