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)”

“When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss – which was his rage – and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.”

“The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.”

“I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office.”

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

“Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.”

“I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see.”

“He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.”

“September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.”

“Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.”

“I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.”

“I loved being away from school. I didn't really fancy school that much when I was little; it wasn't until I was in third or fourth grade that I really settled down at school and I was much happier at home with my mum and she was very creative and sort of fostered all my interests.”

“I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.”

“Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.”

“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.”

“One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.”

“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.”

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

“To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.”

“I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.”