“God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“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, quote from Year of Wonders
“Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home - it is not much,
I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom.
I will not lightly surrender it.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“When she had discovered that I hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other's roasting pan reminds her she's ravenous.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this is the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“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, quote from Year of Wonders
“How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“One does not have to be a priest to be a man!”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the author of it all? The appetites we have all come from Him; they have been with us since Eden. If we slip and fall, He understands our weakness. Did not mighty King David lust, and was he not driven through his lust to do great wrong? And yet God loved David, and gave us, through him, the glory of the Psalms. So, too,”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
Born place: in Sydney, Australia
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“Everyone wishes their life were happier.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Not like beautiful people. They walk this earth, their chin up to the rest of us, and think that great happiness, great love, great joy is their right and their prerogative. Passion as the entitlement of the beautiful, the way power is the entitlement of the rich.” Lily paused. “Especially when it comes to love. Beauty and love become somehow synonymous. How can plain people have great love? They can’t, that’s how. They can have average love, mediocre love, but their hearts can’t soar. Only beautiful hearts can soar.”
“I think you’ve hit on the nail right there,” said Spencer. “Beautiful people don’t necessarily have beautiful hearts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? You don’t fall in love with a heart. You fall in love with a woman’s face, with her body, with her hair, with her smell. That’s first, everything else is secondary. My mother’s beauty when she was young was so extreme that she didn’t understand how every man who met her didn’t love her in extremis.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from The Four Loves
“He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect--those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility--the philosophers of the ages invite YOU.”
― Manly P. Hall, quote from Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic, and Ro
“Аз съм добра майка. Мисля за всичко, което може да им се случи. Предвиждам всяка възможна злополука. А да не говоря за опасностите, които ще ги грозят, когато пораснат. Или когато излязат от градината. Не. Тези опасности си ги запазвам за после. Казах вече. Че за тях ще мисля после. Имам време. Имам време. Засега има толкова катастрофи, които трябва да предположа, толкова катастрофи. Обичам ги, защото мисля за най-лошото, което може да им се случи. За да го предвидя, за да го предвидя. Не за удоволствие мисля за кървави страхотии. Те сами ми се налагат. Това доказва, че държа на децата. Отговорна съм за тях. Те зависят от мене. Те са мои деца. Трябва да направя всичко, зависещо от мен, за да предотвратя безбройните беди, които ги дебнат. Тези ангелчета. Неспособни да се защитят, да разберат кое е добро за тях. Обичам ги. За тяхно добро мисля за всичко това. Не ми прави ни какво удоволствие. Потръпвам при мисълта, че могат да хапнат отровни плодове, да седнат на влажната трева, да ги удари откършен клон, да паднат в кладенеца, да се търкулнат от високия бряг, да глътнат камък, да ги ухапе мравка, пчела, бръмбар, да ги клъвне птица или да се одраскат в къпинака, да помиришат прекалено силно някое цвета и да има влезе листенце в нова, да го запуши, той да се възпали, възпалението да се пренесе в мозъка, да умрат толкова мънички, ето, падат в кладенеца, давят се, един клин се стоварва върху главите им, стъклото се чупва, кръв, кръв…
Тя не издържаше повече. Стана и безшумно отиде в стаята на децата. Седна на един стол. Оттам ги виждаше и трите. Те спяха, спяха, без да сънуват. Лека-полека и тя се унесе със свито сърце в тревожен сън. От време на време се стряскаше в съня си като куче, което мисли за глутницата.”
― Boris Vian, quote from Heartsnatcher
Desert Solitaire
Midnight
Little, Big
Beneath This Man
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