01UndatedIt 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 / quote ↗
02UndatedDoes 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedWhen she thought of the letter beit, it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. 'They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.' In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
04Undatedthe greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
05UndatedI understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
06UndatedWhere was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
07UndatedYou go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
08UndatedI 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 Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, 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 / quote ↗
09UndatedThe wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
10UndatedHe walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
12UndatedAll the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
13UndatedI was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
14UndatedWhen 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.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
15UndatedHe 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.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
16UndatedDavid would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
17UndatedIt 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 ↗
18UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedEven the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
20UndatedAre there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
21UndatedAt fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
22UndatedIt is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
23UndatedHe gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.Geraldine Brooks / quote ↗
