Top 100 Doria Quotes
#1. We sailed to Italy on the Andrea Doria, a year before it sank, and Zoot (Sims) and I played a lot of ping-pong on deck during that trip. Zoot sparked that [Gerry Mulligan's] sextet in an extraordinary way, soloing with joyous abandon and infusing the ensemble parts with his special brand of swing.
Bill Crow
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Jesus Christ," Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past.
Mary Doria Russell
#8. In the North, he discoverd, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual.
Mary Doria Russell
#9. I suppose I should warn you, Padre. In the absence of male supervision, my mother has become a revolutionary." ~Renzo Leoni
Mary Doria Russell
#10. 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
#11. If anything could prove the existence of the soul, he thought, it was the utter emptiness of a corpse.
Mary Doria Russell
#12. Your sorrow is of no interest to me," Sandoz said softly. "If you want absolution, go to a priest.
Mary Doria Russell
#13. 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
#15. Who doesn't love a makeover? Even my husband watches 'What Not To Wear.'
Mary Doria Russell
#16. 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
#17. The Elder is called Dee, first-born, of the Yarbrough lineage, whose landname is VaWaco.
Mary Doria Russell
#18. Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am," he told Morgan, "an unhappy man -
Mary Doria Russell
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I ain't movin' to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin' there but gravel and scorpions.
Mary Doria Russell
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. And Johannes Voelker is the last man on Earth I'd choose as a spiritual director for Sandoz, he thought. Shit or get off the pot, my son.
Mary Doria Russell
#28. If somebody honks a horn in Cleveland, they're saying 'Hi.' It's so rare to be honked at in anger. When we have merging traffic, we just interweave. There's real courtesy.
Mary Doria Russell
#29. 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
#31. 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
#33. By comparison he could read her like an illustrated children's story.
Mary Doria Russell
#34. After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.
Mary Doria Russell
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#43. When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.
And the hundredth boy?
We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.
Mary Doria Russell
#44. Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
Mary Doria Russell
#45. Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady's requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior.
Mary Doria Russell
#46. Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way
Mary Doria Russell
#47. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#48. They strolled toward town, stopping now and then to let him catch his breath and to gaze upward, for 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#49. And she laughed, a full octave, descending from high C like chimes.
Mary Doria Russell
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Bein' born is craps," he decided. He glanced at Morg and let loose that sly, lopsided smile of his. "How we live is poker.
Mary Doria Russell
#53. 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
#54. You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man's vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.
Mary Doria Russell
#55. The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
Mary Doria Russell
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism.
Mary Doria Russell
#61. Bein' born is craps. How we live is poker. Mamma played a bad hand well.
Mary Doria Russell
#62. Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.
Mary Doria Russell
#63. ...she was, after all, a practical woman and the daughter of an economist.
Mary Doria Russell
#64. 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
#65. The Georgian had used more words in 5 minutes than Wyatt had spoken during 1872 and 1873 combined.
Mary Doria Russell
#66. The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?
Mary Doria Russell
#67. Wyatt, I'm from Chicago," Eddie told him. "Let me explain politics to you.
Mary Doria Russell
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)
Mary Doria Russell
#79. The past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.
Mary Doria Russell
#81. The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What's wrong with unreasonable love?
Mary Doria Russell
#82. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)
Mary Doria Russell
#83. ...[Emilio] felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust.
Mary Doria Russell
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived. John
Mary Doria Russell
#89. I know this will sound glib, but don't pretend you aren't feeling what you feel. That's how things slide into hell. Feelings are facts," she said, her voice a little hard, as she began to walk again. "Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If
Mary Doria Russell
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. In Texas, rocks are considered an adequate weaponry during schoolyard scuffles. Dallas children carry a brace of loaded pistols, a concealed Derringer, and a 6 inch Toadsticker in one boot. That's the girls of course. Boys bring howitzers to class.
Mary Doria Russell
#94. My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.
Mary Doria Russell
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.
Mary Doria Russell
#99. It's not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses.
Mary Doria Russell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
