Top 100 Mary Doria Russell Quotes
#1. You know, I've always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.
Mary Doria Russell
#2. 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 -
Mary Doria Russell
#3. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?
Mary Doria Russell
#4. 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!
Mary Doria Russell
#5. Doc seemed to gather himself to say something important, and spoke as firmly as he could, though his voice was somewhere between a whisper and a whine. Wyatt, I cannot make you another denture. No more fights. You get that mad again, shoot the bastard. Promise me.
Mary Doria Russell
#6. Jesus Christ," Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past.
Mary Doria Russell
#7. I suppose I should warn you, Padre. In the absence of male supervision, my mother has become a revolutionary." ~Renzo Leoni
Mary Doria Russell
#8. Isaac didn't understand heartache. Or regret or longing or divided loyalties. Or anger or shattered trust or betrayal. Such things had no clarity. They involved expectations of another's behavior, and Isaac had no such expectations.
Mary Doria Russell
#9. If anything could prove the existence of the soul, he thought, it was the utter emptiness of a corpse.
Mary Doria Russell
#10. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#12. Who doesn't love a makeover? Even my husband watches 'What Not To Wear.'
Mary Doria Russell
#13. The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters.
Mary Doria Russell
#14. The Elder is called Dee, first-born, of the Yarbrough lineage, whose landname is VaWaco.
Mary Doria Russell
#15. The dachshund is a perfectly engineered dog. It is precisely long enough for a single standard stroke of the back, but you aren't paying for any superfluous leg.
Mary Doria Russell
#16. Writing my own novels in the '90s ... I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
Mary Doria Russell
#17. It would not have suprised Emilio Sandoz that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.
Mary Doria Russell
#18. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#19. Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God. ... And when the metaphors fail, we think it's God who's failed us!
Mary Doria Russell
#20. I ain't movin' to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin' there but gravel and scorpions.
Mary Doria Russell
#21. I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
Mary Doria Russell
#22. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#23. No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.
Mary Doria Russell
#25. On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.
Mary Doria Russell
#27. By comparison he could read her like an illustrated children's story.
Mary Doria Russell
#28. After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.
Mary Doria Russell
#29. When the bet is placed," he said, "a moment is carved away from the past and the future. In that enchanted moment, anything is possible. A man's debts and regrets and limitations disappear. He is buyin' the chance to imagine - for one moment at a time - that th enext card I deal will make him rich.
Mary Doria Russell
#30. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#31. 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
Mary Doria Russell
#32. There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger.
Mary Doria Russell
#33. God's got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you're just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.
Mary Doria Russell
#35. Feelings are facts. Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it's what you do about what you feel that matters.
Mary Doria Russell
#36. You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well, said Morgan, I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness.
Mary Doria Russell
#37. Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground - to be divided and conquered by his grandparents - but a garden, where each person who'd contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown.
Mary Doria Russell
#38. The characters I'm most emotionally involved with are like friends you leave behind when you move away. You don't see them regularly anymore, but you still love them and keep in touch.
Mary Doria Russell
#39. You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man's vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.
Mary Doria Russell
#40. The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
Mary Doria Russell
#41. He ain't big and he ain't strong, but that boy's got a by-God streak of fight in him. And he was going to need it.
Mary Doria Russell
#42. 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?" ...
Mary Doria Russell
#43. Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism.
Mary Doria Russell
#44. Bein' born is craps. How we live is poker. Mamma played a bad hand well.
Mary Doria Russell
#45. Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.
Mary Doria Russell
#46. Honey," Bessie's mamma used to say, "politicians and judges and coppers are money-grubbing thieves. They'll screw you, and rob you, and win elections for doing it, but there's no way around them. Smile and pay the sonsabitches off." The
Mary Doria Russell
#47. The Georgian had used more words in 5 minutes than Wyatt had spoken during 1872 and 1873 combined.
Mary Doria Russell
#48. The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?
Mary Doria Russell
#49. Wyatt, I'm from Chicago," Eddie told him. "Let me explain politics to you.
Mary Doria Russell
#50. You ever hear that old joke about the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building?" D.W. asked her. "Yeah. All the way down, you could hear him say, 'So far, so good. So far, so good. So far, so good.' That is George's life story in a nutshell.
Mary Doria Russell
#51. Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future.
Mary Doria Russell
#52. I live and die with the Indians. The first game I attended back in the mid-'90s was almost a religious experience. We were down by six and won by two, and it was glorious. The stadium is so beautiful, and the way it frames the city when you're sitting high above the second base line is spectacular.
Mary Doria Russell
#53. At the risk of descending to unscientific generalizations, 90 percent of Texans give the other 10 percent a bad name." - Attributed to John H. "Doc" Holliday
Mary Doria Russell
#54. Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.
Mary Doria Russell
#55. Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself. He
Mary Doria Russell
#56. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#57. When she finished, no one clapped or even breathed, for they were still inside that sacred place that music can sometimes create.
Mary Doria Russell
#58. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#59. No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise.
"Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed.
Mary Doria Russell
#60. Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)
Mary Doria Russell
#61. The past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.
Mary Doria Russell
#62. The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What's wrong with unreasonable love?
Mary Doria Russell
#63. ...[Emilio] felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust.
Mary Doria Russell
#64. Like so many Boomers, I saw 'Lawrence of Arabia' in 1962 when it was first released and when we were young teenagers. I'm not quite sure why - I really wish some psychologist would explain this - but that movie had a tremendous effect on many of us.
Mary Doria Russell
#65. What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15)
Mary Doria Russell
#66. After all, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. once told him, "Son, sometimes it's enough just to act less like a shithead.
Mary Doria Russell
#67. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.
Mary Doria Russell
#68. I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religions into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known.
Mary Doria Russell
#69. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#70. That was when it came to him that the only unmixed happiness he could think of was when he quit his job with the city after that fight with Bob Wright. So he told Doc that, too, and said, "I never meant to be a lawman. Stumbled into it, really. When I quit, it was a weight off." Dealing
Mary Doria Russell
#71. My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.
Mary Doria Russell
#72. House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological insults. Rain, for example, or a startling gust of wind.
Mary Doria Russell
#73. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#74. Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
Mary Doria Russell
#75. Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.
Mary Doria Russell
#76. Maybe if I'd studied writing instead of anthropology, I'd be more sensible. You know - pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box - but let's face it. Sensible people don't major in anthropology.
Mary Doria Russell
#77. I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed.
Mary Doria Russell
#78. You've seen what," Emilio conceded, "but not why! That's where God is, Anne. In the why of it - in the meaning.
Mary Doria Russell
#79. Doc's idea of "clarifyin' a point of contention" came awful close to spitting in a man's eye.
Mary Doria Russell
#80. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#81. When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.
Mary Doria Russell
#82. Until you've been there, you can't know what it's like to hold yourself to promises you made in good faith a long time ago.
Mary Doria Russell
#83. And yet, in the end, did Klara Hitler's sickly son ever fire a gun? One hollow, hateful little an. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.
Mary Doria Russell
#84. We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything ...
Mary Doria Russell
#85. Guess - You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well," said Morgan, "I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness." The
Mary Doria Russell
#86. See that's where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can't swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God's in charge or he's not ...
Mary Doria Russell
#87. In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.
Mary Doria Russell
#88. She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.
He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.
Mary Doria Russell
#89. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#91. Hope - cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora's box - smiled on him gently all that summer.
Mary Doria Russell
#93. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#94. The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.
Mary Doria Russell
#95. No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.
Mary Doria Russell
#96. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#97. Home," he said softly. "If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.
Mary Doria Russell
#98. Ah, Sofia, darlin'! 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 ...
Mary Doria Russell
#99. Distressing to be hated because of lies, isn't it." (Mirella)
"Especially when there are so many legitimate reasons to be hated." (Schramm)
Mary Doria Russell
#100. Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.
Mary Doria Russell
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