"A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand."
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"You 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 (March)

"To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind."
— Geraldine Brooks

"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 (Year of Wonders)

""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)"
— Geraldine Brooks

"...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361"
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes." "
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"And now, a year has passed since I undertook to go to war, and I wake every day, sweating, in the solitude of the seed store at Oak Landing, to a condition of uncertainty. More than months, more than miles, now stand between me and that passionate orator perched on his tree-stump puplit. One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at."
— Geraldine Brooks

"Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves."
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing."
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt. (p. 120 of Geraldine Brooks' March"
— Geraldine Brooks

"What I do is me, for that I came."
— Geraldine Brooks

"Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

""[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.""
— Geraldine Brooks

"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 (Year of Wonders)