Mary Doria Russell Quotes

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. 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.

~ Mary Doria Russell

There are times...when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth....When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.

~ Mary Doria Russell

...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

~ Mary Doria Russell

He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me that he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business gentleman, or it was a God I cannot worship.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

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

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

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

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

~ Mary Doria Russell

For he had never heard anything like it--did not know such music existed in the world--and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There were parts of it like birdsong, and parts like rolling thunder and hard rain, and parts that glittered like fresh snow when the sun comes out and it’s so cold the air takes your breath away. And parts were like a dust devil spinning past, or a cyclone on the horizon, and all of it cried out for words that he had only read in books and had never said aloud.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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.

~ Mary Doria Russell

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

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

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

Wyatt Earp had been born, and born again, and now there would be a third life, for the iron fist that had seized his soul in childhood had lost its grip at last. The long struggle for control was over, and in its place, he found a wordless acceptance of a truth he'd always known. He was bred to this anger. It had been in him since the cradle. He'd never bullied neighbors or beaten a horse. He'd never punched the front teeth out of a six-year-old's mouth or hit a woman until she begged. But he was no better than his father, and never had been. He was far, far worse.

~ Mary Doria Russell

The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?

~ Mary Doria Russell

Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, �Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

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

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

~ Mary Doria Russell

Tradition was safety, change was danger.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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

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

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

Do you know what made me fall in love with you? George asked suddenly. Anne shook her head, puzzled that he should ask her this now. I heard you laugh, down the hall, just before I got to Spanish class that first day. I couldn't see you. I just heard this fabulous laugh, like a whole octave, top to bottom. And I had to hear it again.

~ Mary Doria Russell

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