Top 120 Mary Doria Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “In 1913, America had a professor-president in the White House – a man of intelligence and principle, elected to clean up the corruption that had flourished in the much of politics for so long. Public health and public schools were beating back the darkness in slums and settlements. The poor were lifted up and the proud brought down as Progressives reined in the power of Big Money.”

— Mary Doria Russell

102. “Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady’s requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior.”

— Mary Doria Russell

103. “The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.”

— Mary Doria Russell

104. “A tale begins and where it ends, matters. Who tells the story and why, that makes all the difference.”

— Mary Doria Russell

105. “We are what we fear in others.”

— Mary Doria Russell

106. “Within himself, Tom Fisher smiles serenely. It’s almost too easy. Promise these morons something they want. Let them believe in it. Then take it away. And tell them who’s to blame.”

— Mary Doria Russell

107. “His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived. John.”

— Mary Doria Russell

108. “The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. 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

109. “Wyatt, I’m from Chicago,” Eddie told him. “Let me explain politics to you.”

— Mary Doria Russell

110. “If you learn something from each person you meet and from each book you read, you will be the best-educated person in the world.”

— Mary Doria Russell

111. “Now here’s my idea about God. I think we’re like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man.” “Maybe there’s a lady,” Nico suggested helpfully. Frans.”

— Mary Doria Russell

112. “But there you are: the reasons for going to war might be a shameless hoax, but the war itself was real, and by God, America was in it!”

— Mary Doria Russell

113. “Did you think you were the only one? Is it possible that you are so arrogant?” he asked, in tones of wonderment. Sandoz was blinking rapidly now. “Did you think you were the only one ever to wonder if what we do is worth the price we pay? Did you honestly believe that you alone, of all those who have gone, were the single man to lose God? Do you think we would have a name for the sin of despair, if only you had experienced it?”

— Mary Doria Russell

114. “Isaac didn’t understand heartache. Or regret or longing or divided loyalties. Or anger or shattered trust or betrayal. Such things had no clarity. They involved expectations of another’s behavior, and Isaac had no such expectations.”

— Mary Doria Russell

115. “Hope swears, “You’re different, you matter.” She whispers, “Miracles happen.” She says, often quite reasonably, “New treatments are being developed all the time.” She promises, “You’ll beat the odds.” A hundred to one? A thousand to one? A million to one? “Eight to five”, hope lies. Odds are when your time comes, you won’t even ask for or against. You’ll swing up on that horse and ride.”

— Mary Doria Russell

116. “Do what works. That was the motto. Grab what you can when you can. That was the plan. It was not a golden age, as Mr. Twain had recently pointed out, but a cheap and flashy gilded one. A time of fakery and exuberant corruption, of patronage and cronyism and every species of shameless self-seeking. In such times, even honorable men give up trying to draw the line. It’s different now, they always think. Everything is different now.”

— Mary Doria Russell

117. “He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers, he thought in the darkness.”

— Mary Doria Russell

118. “Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground – to be divided and conquered by his grandparents – but a garden, where each person who’d contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown.”

— Mary Doria Russell

119. “I want to belong with someone. I want to feel at the center of something, and not the edge. I want children and grandchildren. I don’t want to grow old and die, knowing that when I die, there will be no more like me.”

— Mary Doria Russell

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

— Mary Doria Russell

121. “It wasn’t in John Candotti’s nature to be suspicious of motives. There were people who loved to play organizational chess, to pit one person against another, to maneuver and plot and anticipate everyone else’s next three moves, but John had no talent for the game.”

— Mary Doria Russell

122. “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?”

— Mary Doria Russell

123. “There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger.”

— Mary Doria Russell

124. “Say what you will about Mormons, but they are very fine dancers.”

— Mary Doria Russell

125. “He respected her before he loved her, and he loved her before he finished his lunch that first day.”

— Mary Doria Russell

126. “Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new nation – sovereign and independent – that had just been born. In.”

— Mary Doria Russell

127. “War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile.”

— Mary Doria Russell

128. “In science, all sensibly phrased questions are at least potentially answerable, while answers to the questions of faith are, by their very definition, unknowable. With The Sparrow, I hoped to show that both kinds of questions are worth asking, and worth thinking deeply about.”

— Mary Doria Russell

129. “Whenever we said ‘they,’ Mama told us to name two.” Claudette divides the lump of cheese, handing half to Albert. “Mama said if you can’t name two actual real people, then you’re just being prejudiced. So name two peasants who hate us.”

— Mary Doria Russell

130. “A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.”

— Mary Doria Russell