179 Quotes by Mary Doria Russell

Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it’s fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what’s out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.

His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived. John.

If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God’s own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.

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.