179 Quotes by Mary Doria Russell

No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise. "Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed.

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.

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.

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.

Edward admired the beauty of cats, but had learned to think of them as lithe and lethal dander-delivery systems.

Who am I to judge a life misspent?

Sadie was at his side when the old desire to leave everything behind rose up in him again.“Suppose . . .” he began. “Suppose . . .”Then he moved on, one last time.

Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.