Quotes from Mary Doria Russell

War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile.

he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

Dünyadaki hüznün yar?s? seni istemeyen birini istemektir

Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students—the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet.

I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God's will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.

Listen', he said seriously, 'I'm not just wasting your time telling funny stories. You have to know about stuff like this or your program is going to claim it's found intelligent life on Mars. And everyone knows there's only Australians there, right?

Jimmy was no fool but he'd been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually.

He respected her before he loved her, and he loved her before he finished his lunch that first day.

No, sir," Wyatt insisted. "There can't be one law for rich Texans and another law for broke Texans, and another law for Negroes, and another one for Chinamen, and squaws, and Irishmen, and whores, and another one for everybody else. I can't parse it that way, Dog! I am not that smart! There's got to be one law for everybody, or I can't do this job. You want my badge or not?

I still have a headache powder saved up

The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. 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.

You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love?" she asked him. "You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you.

But there you are: the reasons for going to war might be a shameless hoax, but the war itself was real, and by God, America was in it!

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks, she said coolly. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.

Knowing things about people is not the same as understanding them

Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.

One had to be patient to thrive in Rome, where time is measured not in centuries but in millennia

out whose side they were on. Even Fat

tidy up before leaving for the day. When

The strain of a long illness will exhaust the most compassionate.

If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God?

Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison

Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way.

Religion – the wishful thinking of an ape that talks! You know what I think?' he asked rhetorically, trying to distract himself from yet another death. 'Random shit happens, and we turn it into stories and call it sacred scripture—