Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell was born on August 19, 1950, in Chicago, Illinois. She attended Glenbard East High School before pursuing higher education at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Northeastern University. Her academic formation encompassed anthropology, paleoanthropology, and paleontology, and she holds United States citizenship.
Russell is a novelist and science fiction writer who has worked in American English. She wrote The Sparrow and Children of God, two novels that brought her recognition across several award bodies. Over the course of her career she received the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the BSFA Award for Best Novel, the Otherwise Award, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Michigan Notable Books distinction. Her identities as an anthropologist, paleoanthropologist, and paleontologist run alongside her work as a fiction writer, reflecting the breadth of her intellectual formation across both the sciences and literature.
Russell is currently retired. The awards she accumulated across her career as a novelist — including recognition from the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel — mark the range of her reception among readers and critics of science fiction and beyond. Her two novels, The Sparrow and Children of God, remain the concrete anchors of her published output as a fiction writer.
Quotes by Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell's insights on:
I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed.
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.
At the risk of descent into unscientific generalization, I must report to you that ninety percent of Texans give the other ten percent a bad name, he told Martha Anne.
What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back...
The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.
In the beginning,” Scripture taught, “there was the Word,” and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.