The greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.

— Geraldine Brooks

[The haggard] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story." What do you mean?" Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.

— Geraldine Brooks

The heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow.

— Geraldine Brooks

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

— Geraldine Brooks

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

— Geraldine Brooks

The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.

— Geraldine Brooks

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

— Geraldine Brooks

The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.

— Geraldine Brooks

This night he was a king before he was a man. At this time, this troubled me. Later, I would have cause to wish it were always so.

— Geraldine Brooks

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.

— Geraldine Brooks