179 Quotes by Mary Doria Russell

Listen', he said seriously, 'I'm not just wasting your time telling funny stories. You have to know about stuff like this or your program is going to claim it's found intelligent life on Mars. And everyone knows there's only Australians there, right?

Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way

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.

There are no beggars on Rakhat. There is no unemployment. There is no overcrowding. No starvation. No environmental degradation. There is no genetic disease. The elderly do not suffer decline. Those with terminal illness do not linger. They pay a terrible price for this system, but we too pay...and the coin we use is the suffering of children. How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here? Just because their corpses aren’t eaten doesn’t make our species any more moral!

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.

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.

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

...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

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.