Year of Wonders Quotes

“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

“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, 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, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

“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, 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, Year of Wonders

“How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, 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, 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, Year of Wonders

“Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, 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, Year of Wonders

“For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village full of sinners or a host of saints.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, Year of Wonders

“She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, Year of Wonders

“For the hour in which I am able to lose myself in someone else’s thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, Year of Wonders

“Since then, I’ve tended so many bodies, people I loved and people I barely knew. But Sam’s was the first. I bathed him with the soap he liked, because he said it smelled of the children. Poor slow Sam. He never quite realized that it was the children who smelled of the soap. I washed them in it every night before he came home. I made it with heather blooms, a much gentler soap than the one I made for him. His soap was almost all grit and lye. It had to be, to scrape that paste of sweat and soil from his skin. He would bury his poor tired face in the babies’ hair and breathe the fresh scent of them. It was the closest he got to the airy hillsides. Down in the mine at daybreak, out again after sundown. A life in the dark. And a death there, too.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. 'I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me - but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, 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, 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, Year of Wonders

“I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, Year of Wonders

“I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.”
― Geraldine Brooks, 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, Year of Wonders

“It became impossible for me to look into the face of a neighbor and not imagine him dead. Then, I would find my mind turning over how we would manage without his skill at the plough or the loom or the cobbler’s bench. We were sorely depleted already in trades of all kinds. Horses who threw a shoe went without since the death of the farrier. We were without malter and mason, carpenter and cloth-weaver, thatcher and tailor. Many fields lay covered in unbroken clods, neither harrowed nor sown. Whole houses stood empty; entire families gone from us, and names that had been known here for centuries gone with them.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“HOW DO WE TUMBLE down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. So it seems apt indeed to speak of the Fall. For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders