It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne’s last night and to receive no plain answers,” he said. “Perhaps this is because we can’t unders… - Mary Doria Russell

"It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne’s last night and to receive no plain answers," he said. "Perhaps this is because we can’t understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable."

"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."

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

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.