Mary Doria Russell Quotes

In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God's heart; it was indifference.

He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, praying in the face of his doubt.

Jimmy was no fool but he’d been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually.

"...Doc's idea of "clarifyin' a point of contention" came awful close to spitting in a man's eye."

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.

here’s what good people do: We don’t give up. We will not be cowed. We will refute their lies. We will get the vote, and we will use it. We will take them to court. We will march in their streets, and we will fight for justice every damned step of the way.

Then he smiled into her eyes and asked, in the dry academic tones of an astronomer discussing a theoretical point with a colleague, 'How long do you suppose I can go on loving you more every day?' And he devised for her a calculus of love, which approached infinity as a limit, and made her smile again.

I honestly don’t know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.

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.

the best man for the job can sometimes be a four-year-old girl.

hair and crumbs and unidentifiable orts to be vacuumed,

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 …

"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. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself.

You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man’s vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.

Hope — cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box — smiled on him gently all that summer.