Top 120 Mary Doria Russell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The sparrow still falls.”

— Mary Doria Russell

2. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

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

— Mary Doria Russell

4. “The poor you will always have with you,′ Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?”

— Mary Doria Russell

5. “Tradition was safety; change was danger.”

— Mary Doria Russell

6. “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.”

— Mary Doria Russell

7. “When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.”

— Mary Doria Russell

8. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

9. “When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.”

— Mary Doria Russell

10. “Home... if there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.”

— Mary Doria Russell

11. “Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I’m presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.”

— Mary Doria Russell

12. “Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own.”

— Mary Doria Russell

13. “Sailing is the perfect antidote for age, Reyes. Everything you do on a sailboat is done slowly and thoughtfully. Most of the time, an old body is entirely capable of doing whatever needs to be done while you’re cruising. And if the sea is determined to teach you a lesson, well, a young back is no more capable than an old one of resisting an ocean, so experience counts more than ever.”

— Mary Doria Russell

14. “How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?”

— Mary Doria Russell

15. “No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.”

— Mary Doria Russell

16. “Rain falls on everyone, lightning strikes some. What cannot be changed is best forgotten. God made the world, and He saw that it was good. Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect. Good.”

— Mary Doria Russell

17. “Hope – cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box – smiled on him gently all that summer.”

— Mary Doria Russell

18. “How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?” He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.”

— Mary Doria Russell

19. “God’s got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you’re just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.”

— Mary Doria Russell

20. “Marc was in charge of the Wolverton tube plant colony and the tilapia tank, which would produce fresh food to supplement the packaged stuff they were bringing.”

— Mary Doria Russell

21. “Deus vult, mes amis,” Marc Robichaux called cheerfully from the galley. “God likes it that way.”

— Mary Doria Russell

22. “Feelings are facts. Look straight at ’em and deal with ’em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it’s what you do about what you feel that matters.”

— Mary Doria Russell

23. “There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists. And Matthew 10:29.”

— Mary Doria Russell

24. “In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.”

— Mary Doria Russell

25. “I know this will sound glib, but don’t pretend you aren’t feeling what you feel. That’s how things slide into hell. Feelings are facts,” she said, her voice a little hard, as she began to walk again. “Look straight at ’em and deal with ’em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If.”

— Mary Doria Russell

26. “We are none of us born into Eden,” Doc said reasonably. “world’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand?“...”

— Mary Doria Russell

27. “He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, praying in the face of his doubt.”

— Mary Doria Russell

28. “Who am I to judge a life misspent?”

— Mary Doria Russell

29. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

30. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

31. “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

— Mary Doria Russell

32. “If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”

— Mary Doria Russell

33. “It was politicians saying, “Let’s you and him fight!”

— Mary Doria Russell

34. “You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they’re religious. I do what I do,” Anne said, biting off each word, “without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much.”

— Mary Doria Russell

35. “Honey,” Bessie’s mamma used to say, “politicians and judges and coppers are money-grubbing thieves. They’ll screw you, and rob you, and win elections for doing it, but there’s no way around them. Smile and pay the sonsabitches off.” The.”

— Mary Doria Russell

36. “You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.”

— Mary Doria Russell

37. “It is a scholar’s task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it’s no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you’re considering?”

— Mary Doria Russell

38. “In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God’s heart; it was indifference.”

— Mary Doria Russell

39. “He wondered then if Jesus expected gratitude as Lazarus emerged, stinking, from the crypt. Maybe Lazarus was a disappointment to everyone, too.”

— Mary Doria Russell

40. “Even if he hadn’t spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students – the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet.”

— Mary Doria Russell

41. “What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”

— Mary Doria Russell

42. “Dust rises at every step, fine as flour. It is dried river silt, that dust. Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.”

— Mary Doria Russell

43. “The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.”

— Mary Doria Russell

44. “Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself. He.”

— Mary Doria Russell

45. “Raise your sights, sugar. Aim low all you’ll hit is rats, snakes and rock bottom” from Epitaph.”

— Mary Doria Russell

46. “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...”

— Mary Doria Russell

47. “I’ll take honest arrogance over fake humility any day.”

— Mary Doria Russell

48. “Instead of taking a year off, I started Dreamers of the Day exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for A Thread of Grace to the publisher!”

— Mary Doria Russell

49. “It came to Morgan that Nicholas must have been a beaten boy, too, and that meant Grampa Earp was, as well. Which was no surprise, really, when Morg thought about that mean old man. How many sons were in that chain? Morgan wondered, and grief gave way to the pride he’d felt the day his brother Wyatt stood up to his first bully and put an end to a chain of vengeful, frightened, beaten boys.”

— Mary Doria Russell

50. “The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.”

— Mary Doria Russell