Quotes from Mary Doria Russell

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?" He said nothing more that day, but Ha'anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.

It was politicians saying, "Let's you and him fight!

If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God's own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.

On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart. And on your worst days? she had asked that night. Even if it's only poetry, it's poetry to live by, Sofia -- poetry to die for, he told her with quiet conviction.

Kinda spooky, ain't it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin' on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn't get there on his own.

It was just as well that neither Wyatt nor Morgan inquired about the provenance of the teeth themselves, for Wyatt's new ones were among the hundreds of thousands collected from battlegrounds, sorted by type and size, and made available for restorative dentistry for many years after the war. With John Henry's sketches and detailed measurements to go by, his cousin Robert had found a pair of upper centrals that matched Morgan's closely.

It wasn't in John Candotti's nature to be suspicious of motives. There were people who loved to play organizational chess, to pit one person against another, to maneuver and plot and anticipate everyone else's next three moves, but John had no talent for the game

I honestly don't know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.

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

It came to Morgan that Nicholas must have been a beaten boy, too, and that meant Grampa Earp was, as well. Which was no surprise, really, when Morg thought about that mean old man. How many sons were in that chain? Morgan wondered, and grief gave way to the pride he'd felt the day his brother Wyatt stood up to his first bully and put an end to a chain of vengeful, frightened, beaten boys.

But Schrödinger said that the cat isn't actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead." Nico thought that over. "You could listen to hear if it's purring." Frans

Jesus Christ, Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past.

Now here's my idea about God. I think we're like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man." "Maybe there's a lady," Nico suggested helpfully. Frans

There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.

Edward admired the beauty of cats, but had learned to think of them as lithe and lethal dander-delivery systems.

Do what works. That was the motto. Grab what you can when you can. That was the plan. It was not a golden age, as Mr. Twain had recently pointed out, but a cheap and flashy gilded one. A time of fakery and exuberant corruption, of patronage and cronyism and every species of shameless self-seeking. In such times, even honorable men give up trying to draw the line. It's different now, they always think. Everything is different now.

One thing I can say for certain. There?'s just no telling whom God will take a liking to.

His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived. John

Sadie was at his side when the old desire to leave everything behind rose up in him again. "Suppose . . ." he began. "Suppose . . ." Then he moved on, one last time.

Anne shrieked with laughter, but George yelled, "I don't suppose we could get a little gravity around here?" and D.W. hollered back, Nope. All we got is levity." And thus began the first morning of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat. [148]

He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God's love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical, as he caught and repeated as much of what everyone said to him as he could, soaking up the music and cadence, the pattern of phonemes on the fly, gravely accepting and repeating Askama's quiet corrections when he got things wrong.

The nations of the earth that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers must live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature.. This gives them a special insight

The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.

After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.