“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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“We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
“I must cry more than anyone you know,” I said. He brushed the hair back from my face and smiled. “You puke a lot, too.”
― Tracey Garvis-Graves, quote from On the Island
“In ninety seconds they were naked and he was nibbling at her ear while his hand rubbed her pubic mat; but a saboteur was at work at his brain. 'I love you,' he thought, and it was not untrue because he loved all women now, knowing partially what sex was really all about, but he couldn't bring himself to say it because it was not totally true, either, since he loved Mavis more, much more. 'I'm awfully fond of you,' he almost said, but the absurdity of it stopped him. Her hand cupped his cock and found it limp; her eyes opened and looked into his enquiringly. He kissed her lips quickly and moved his hand lower, inserting a ringer until he found the clitoris. But even when her breathing got deeper, he did not respond as usual, and her hand began massaging his cock more desperately. He slid down, kissing nipples and bellybutton on the way, and began licking her clitoris. As soon as she came, he cupped her buttocks, lifted her pelvis, got his tongue into her vagina and forced another quick orgasm, immediately lowering her slightly again and beginning a very gentle and slow return in spiral fashion back to the clitoris. But still he was flaccid.
'Stop,' Stella breathed. 'Let me do you, baby.'
George moved upward on the bed and hugged her. 'I love you,' he said, and suddenly it did not sound like a lie.
Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. 'It takes a lot to get those words out of you, doesn't it?' she said bemusedly.
'Honesty is the worst policy,' George said grimly. 'I was a child prodigy, you know? A freak. It was rugged. I had to have some defense, and somehow I picked honesty. I was always with older boys so I never won a fight. The only way I could feel superior, or escape total inferiority, was to be the most honest bastard on the planet earth.'
'So you can't say 'I love you' unless you mean it?' Stella laughed. 'You're probably the only man in America with that problem. If you could only be a woman for a while, baby! You can't imagine what liars most men are.'
'Oh, I've said it at times. When it was at least half true. But it always sounded like play-acting to me, and I felt it sounded that way to the woman, too. This time it just came out, perfectly natural, no effort.'
'That is something,' Stella grinned. 'And I can't let it go unrewarded.' Her black body slid downward and he enjoyed the esthetic effect as his eyes followed her— black on white, like the yinyang or the Sacred Chao—what was the psychoses of the white race that made this beauty seem ugly to most of them? Then her lips closed over his penis and he found that the words had loosened the knot: he was erect in a second. He closed his eyes to savor the sensation, then opened them to look down at her Afro hairdo, her serious dark face, his cock slipping back and forth between her lips. 'I love you,' he repeated, with even more conviction. 'Oh, Christ, Oh, Eris, oh baby baby, I love you!' He closed his eyes again, and let the Robot move his pelvis in response to her. 'Oh, stop,' he said, 'stop,' drawing her upward and turning her over, 'together,' he said, mounting her, 'together,' as her eyes closed when he entered her and then opened again for a moment meeting his in total tenderness, 'I love you, Stella, I love,' and he knew it was so far along that the weight wouldn't bother her, collapsing, using his arms to hug her, not supporting himself, belly to belly and breast to breast, her arms hugging him also and her voice saying, 'I love you, too, oh, I love you,' and moving with it, saying 'angel' and 'darling' and then saying nothing, the explosion and the light again permeating his whole body not just the penis, a passing through the mandala to the other side and a long sleep.”
― Robert Shea, quote from The Illuminatus! Trilogy
“We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.”
― Susan Cain, quote from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
“I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Richard III
Eleven on Top
The View from Saturd...
State of Fear
Quintana of Charyn
Two Boys Kissing
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