Quotes from Mary Doria Russell

If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.

Rain falls on everyone, lightning strikes some. What cannot be changed is best forgotten. God made the world, and He saw that it was good. Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect. Good.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.

I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.

Who doesn't love a makeover? Even my husband watches 'What Not To Wear.'

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.

Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!

John Henry Holliday didn't have a mother to love him when he was grown, so I have taken him for my own. My fondest hope for Doc is that it will win for him the compassion and respect I think he deserves.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.

The Doc Holliday of legend is a gambler and gunman who appears out of nowhere in 1881, arriving in Tombstone with a bad reputation and a hooker named Big Nose Kate.

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.

Tradition was safety; change was danger.

Horses are mirrors. They'll show you back whatever you show them. Watch a man with a horse, and you'll see what's inside his own self.

You know what I think? Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent -- salt of the earth! Saints! Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle, just trying to get by.

It's not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses.

We are none of us born into Eden, Doc said reasonably. world's plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what's the best way to play a bad hand?...

Home, he said softly. If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.

Ringo's chuckle got tangled up with a cough. He tossed back a shot, cleared his throat, and said, Politics, from the Latin. Poly , meaning 'many.' Ticks meaning 'bloodsucking little bastards.

He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me that he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business gentleman, or it was a God I cannot worship.