Best 68 quotes of Mary Doria Russell on MyQuotes

Mary Doria Russell

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Dachshunds have their own agenda and can be stubborn about seeing their plans through to completion. What Rosie lacked in consistency, she made up for in enthusiasm. Most of the time when I called her name, she sprinted back, her long ears cocked and flying like a little girl's pigtails. Each encounter was a glorious reunion, even if we'd been parted for only a minute or two. I had never felt so loved.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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!

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Like so many Boomers, I saw Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 when it was first released and when we were young teenagers. Im not quite sure why - I really wish some psychologist would explain this - but that movie had a tremendous effect on many of us.

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    Mary Doria Russell

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

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    Sandoz turned and accepted the book, looking at the spine. "Aeschylus?" Wordlessly, Guiuliani pointed out the passage, and Emilio studied it a while, slowly translating the Greek in his mind. Finally, he said, "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, againstour will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    The characters Im most emotionally involved with are like friends you leave behind when you move away. You dont see them regularly anymore, but you still love them and keep in touch.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    The sparrow still falls.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love? You're just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defences. 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 you can trust him not to hurt you.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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.

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    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

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

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    Mary Doria Russell

    And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?

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    Mary Doria Russell

    As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day int he Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a life-time in the making. It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rhakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    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

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    Mary Doria Russell

    At times, the solution to a maze is to reduce it to embers ans walk straight through the ashes." ― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mary Doria Russell

    How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

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    Mary Doria Russell

    I ain't movin' to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin' there but gravel and scorpions.