The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
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. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view – a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and… truckloads of guts, you know. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
I’m very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use – what do they call those things? – composite characters. I don’t think that’s right. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
Certainly I’m still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it’s no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self? Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
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 Read Quote
You’ve got mail!’ exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I’m 10 years old again, waiting for the postman’s whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon. Geraldine Brooks Read Quote
