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Top Mary Doria Russell Quotes

Browse top 59 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Mary Doria Russell.

Favorite Mary Doria Russell Quotes

1. "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
2. "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
3. "There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, 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 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 its 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 its higher truth. He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we caputure that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying." ~ Mary Doria Russell
4. "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
5. "Interviewer: Have you ever considered writing nonfiction?Mary Doria Russell: Oh, honey, I did! Let's see...There was "A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Cannibalism at the Krapina Neandertal Site." That was a big hit. And who could ever forget "Cutmarks on the Engis II Calvarium"? Then there was "Browridge Development as a Function of Bending Stress in the Supraorbital Region." I got tons of reprint requests for that one.Trust me fiction is better." ~ Mary Doria Russell
6. "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
7. "Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief." ~ Mary Doria Russell
8. "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
9. "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
10. "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
11. "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." ~ Mary Doria Russell
12. "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
13. "There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."So God just leaves?"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."But the sparrow still falls." ~ Mary Doria Russell
14. "...[That] is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, the rest of it was God's will too, and that gentlemen is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn't it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances...is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God." ~ Mary Doria Russell
15. "Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine." ~ Mary Doria Russell
16. "Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism." ~ Mary Doria Russell
17. "Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way" ~ Mary Doria Russell
18. "The Georgian had used more words in 5 minutes than Wyatt had spoken during 1872 and 1873 combined." ~ Mary Doria Russell
19. "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
20. "Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)" ~ Mary Doria Russell
21. "Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)" ~ Mary Doria Russell
22. "For Russian Jews, Zionism was an immediate solution to age-old problems."Anywhere is better than Russia," Karl agreed, "but for Western Jews, Zionism is a trap, I think. Once Jews are permitted a territorial center, it will be too easy to drive the rest of us from every other nation on Earth. ‘Go back where you belong!' " he cried dismissively, jerking his thumb toward Palestine. " ‘Oh, by the way, leave all your possessions behind.' "... But I have no need of some artificial homeland invented by the British. I am not a German Jew, Agnes, but a Jewish German." ~ Mary Doria Russell
23. "The Elder is called Dee, first-born, of the Yarbrough lineage, whose landname is VaWaco." ~ Mary Doria Russell
24. "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
25. "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
26. "...Doc's idea of "clarifyin' a point of contention" came awful close to spitting in a man's eye." ~ Mary Doria Russell
27. "[I]t is easier to ask forgiveness than to obtain permission." ~ Mary Doria Russell
28. "You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man's vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism." ~ Mary Doria Russell
29. "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
30. "The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?" ~ 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
32. "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
33. "Maybe that's the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other." ~ Mary Doria Russell
34. "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
35. "Until you get the measure of your own soul, Jim, don't be quick to condemn a priest, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not scolding you, sweetheart," she said hurriedly. "It's just that, 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. Do you hang in there, or cut your losses? Soldier on, or admit defeat and try to make the best of things?" She'd looked a little sheepish then and admitted, "You know, I used to be a real hardass about stuff like this. No retreat, no surrender! But now? Jimmy, I honestly don't know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth." ~ Mary Doria Russell
36. "Abandon a dachshund and upon your return, you may well be confronted with a small token of her displeasure. This, for the dachshund, is an undignified but necessary form of training. Eventually, you will learn your lesson, which is to take you with her everywhere. When you have finally accepted this, you will be generously rewarded for your good behavior by a jaunty, joyful companion." ~ Mary Doria Russell
37. "I ain't movin' to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin' there but gravel and scorpions." ~ Mary Doria Russell
38. "Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross." ~ Mary Doria Russell
39. "Dust rises at every step, fine as flour. It is dried river silt, that dust. Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book." ~ Mary Doria Russell
40. "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
41. "In a Loaded Questions Interview on the subject of flipping a coin to see which characters would live and which would die for her novel "Thread of Grace": "So the problem was, How do I avoid writing a Feel-Good Holocaust Novel?" ~ Mary Doria Russell
42. "The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it." ~ Mary Doria Russell
43. "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
44. "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
45. "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
46. "Home," he said softly. "If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it." ~ Mary Doria Russell
47. "Horses are mirrors. They'll show you back whatever you show them. Watch a man with a horse, and you'll see what's inside his own self." ~ Mary Doria Russell
48. "To leave the apple unpicked—that was sin." ~ Mary Doria Russell
49. "By comparison he could read her like an illustrated children's story." ~ Mary Doria Russell
50. "How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?" ~ Mary Doria Russell
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A história demonstrou decididamente que as mulheres sabem ser maléficas"
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