Quotes from Mary Doria Russell

The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They'd been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly. And if that wasn't enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda— the advertising industry.

privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.

the west Kansas sky is black velvet on clear, cool December nights, and the Milky Way is strung across it like the diamond necklace of a crooked banker's mistress.

And she laughed, a full octave, descending from high C like chimes.

Et diye yedikleriniz meydan okuyor, et diye yedikleriniz ba? kald?r?yor, et diye yedikleriniz sava??yor! Et diye yediklerinizin nefesi ensenizde...

Our physicists have confirmed the practicality of using an altered asteroid for transport

But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.

In the beginning, Scripture taught, there was the Word, and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.

It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing.

And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?

She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half bogeret l'reshut nafsha--an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived.

The household was densely populated by a lively gang of children, homemade and Fostered, mix thoroughly and well.

By comparison he could read her like an illustrated children's story.

It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, Well, you screwed up. Everybody screws up. It's okay. His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life.

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

I would not have voted for the man," Doc admitted, "but this—" He lifted a fine-boned hand toward the street, where small groups of Cow Boys were now tearing down Allen on horseback, shooting at the sky and racing beyond the city limits before the police could do anything about the ruckus. "This is indecent.

A tale begins and where it ends, matters. Who tells the story and why, that makes all the difference.

Its not lying, it's remembering things the way they should have been.

He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers, he thought in the darkness.

Home...if there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.

hair and crumbs and unidentifiable orts to be vacuumed

I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed.

Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)

There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness.