Top 120 Mary Doria Russell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.”

— Mary Doria Russell

52. “It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing.”

— Mary Doria Russell

53. “Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross.”

— Mary Doria Russell

54. “So God just leaves?” John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. “Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck!” “No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.”

— Mary Doria Russell

55. “Bein’ born is craps,” he decided. He glanced at Morg and let loose that sly, lopsided smile of his. “How we live is poker.”

— Mary Doria Russell

56. “Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia Mendes did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life’s normal condition. So, as the first weeks after the massacre passed, she simply counted herself lucky to be among others who did not weep and wail for the dead.”

— Mary Doria Russell

57. “Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.”

— Mary Doria Russell

58. “I honestly don’t know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.”

— Mary Doria Russell

59. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

60. “I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God’s will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.”

— Mary Doria Russell

61. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

62. “I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known? When we substitute concurrence for fact, fantasy quickly replaces knowledge. Why? Because knowledge is much more trouble to acquire!”

— Mary Doria Russell

63. “It was just as well that neither Wyatt nor Morgan inquired about the provenance of the teeth themselves, for Wyatt’s new ones were among the hundreds of thousands collected from battlegrounds, sorted by type and size, and made available for restorative dentistry for many years after the war. With John Henry’s sketches and detailed measurements to go by, his cousin Robert had found a pair of upper centrals that matched Morgan’s closely.”

— Mary Doria Russell

64. “The trouble with illusions is that you aren’t aware you have any until they are taken away from you.”

— Mary Doria Russell

65. “She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half “bogeret l’reshut nafsha” – an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived.”

— Mary Doria Russell

66. “She taught them that every soul is a small reflection of God, and that it is wicked to murder because when a life is taken, we lose that unique revelation of God’s nature.”

— Mary Doria Russell

67. “Once an air squadron commander, he knew there were many things one could not control when engaged in battle, and that knowledge dictated an iron-willed insistence that what could be controlled must be brought to perfection.”

— Mary Doria Russell

68. “Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.”

— Mary Doria Russell

69. “Like so many Boomers, I saw Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 when it was first released and when we were young teenagers. Im not quite sure why – I really wish some psychologist would explain this – but that movie had a tremendous effect on many of us.”

— Mary Doria Russell

70. “I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed.”

— Mary Doria Russell

71. “When she finished, no one clapped or even breathed, for they were still inside that sacred place that music can sometimes create.”

— Mary Doria Russell

72. “I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religions into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known.”

— Mary Doria Russell

73. “His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life.”

— Mary Doria Russell

74. “After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.”

— Mary Doria Russell

75. “It’s not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses.”

— Mary Doria Russell

76. “Whatever you worship will consume you, Dong-Sing wrote one week. Bob Wright worships money. Wyatt Earp worships justice. Eddie Foy worships applause. Doc worships home and family, as I do. How will this consume us?”

— Mary Doria Russell

77. “Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.”

— Mary Doria Russell

78. “Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.”

— Mary Doria Russell

79. “I would not have voted for the man,” Doc admitted, “but this – ” He lifted a fine-boned hand toward the street, where small groups of Cow Boys were now tearing down Allen on horseback, shooting at the sky and racing beyond the city limits before the police could do anything about the ruckus. “This is indecent.”

— Mary Doria Russell

80. “All the muscles of the palms had been carefully cut from the bones, doubling the length of the fingers, and Sandoz’s hands reminded John of childhood Halloween skeletons.”

— Mary Doria Russell

81. “You’ve seen what,” Emilio conceded, “but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it – in the meaning.”

— Mary Doria Russell

82. “The household was densely populated by a lively gang of children, homemade and Fostered, mix thoroughly and well.”

— Mary Doria Russell

83. “I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.”

— Mary Doria Russell

84. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

85. “Its not lying, it’s remembering things the way they should have been.”

— Mary Doria Russell

86. “I am damned if I will spend my time listenin’ to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!”

— Mary Doria Russell

87. “Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.” She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, “They’ve all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt.”

— Mary Doria Russell

88. “This much is sure: if Kate hadn’t gone back to Doc Holiday on the afternoon of June 10th, 1878, you never would have heard of him. You wouldn’t know the names of Wyatt Earp, or any of his brothers. The Clantons and McLaurys would be utterly forgotten. And Tombstone would be nothing more than an Arizona ghost town with an ironic name. Too late now.”

— Mary Doria Russell

89. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

90. “There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.”

— Mary Doria Russell

91. “Jimmy was no fool but he’d been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually.”

— Mary Doria Russell

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

— Mary Doria Russell

93. “My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.”

— Mary Doria Russell

94. “No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.”

— Mary Doria Russell

95. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

96. “Your sorrow is of no interest to me,” Sandoz said softly. “If you want absolution, go to a priest.”

— Mary Doria Russell

97. “In the past few years, he’d worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn’t much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. “Wyatt,” the man told him, “the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don’t kill the customers.” Most of the time, it seemed sensible to keep things just that simple. It.”

— Mary Doria Russell

98. “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.”

— Mary Doria Russell

99. “Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. “ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ” “But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said.”

— Mary Doria Russell

100. “That was when it came to him that the only unmixed happiness he could think of was when he quit his job with the city after that fight with Bob Wright. So he told Doc that, too, and said, “I never meant to be a lawman. Stumbled into it, really. When I quit, it was a weight off.” Dealing.”

— Mary Doria Russell