Quotes from Children of God

“How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.
He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Celestina Giuliani learned the word "slander" at her cousin's baptism.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15)”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’,” he said one night, after a few drinks. “Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Perfect Compassion and Perfect Justice. Or maybe,” he suggested, slouching back in his chair and favoring her with a lopsided, wily grin, “maybe God is exactly as advertised in the Torah. Maybe, along with all its other truths and beauties, Judaism preserves for each generation of us the reality of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses—the God of Jesus.” A cranky, uncanny God, D.W. called Him. “A God with quirky, unfathomable rules, a God who gets fed up with us and pissed off! But quick to forgive, Sofia, and generous,”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly’s wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that’s so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man’s vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“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, quote from Children of God

“Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, �Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.�”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“Et diye yedikleriniz meydan okuyor, et diye yedikleriniz baş kaldırıyor, et diye yedikleriniz savaşıyor! Et diye yediklerinizin nefesi ensenizde...”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

“After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from Children of God

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“He made up his mind to see Kate, and with this view he went down to Westmoreland; and took himself to a small wayside inn at Shap among the fells, which had been known to him of old. He gave his sister notice that he would be there, and begged her to come over to him as early as she might find it possible on the’ morning after his arrival. He himself reached the place late in the evening by train from London. There is a station at Shap, by which the railway company no doubt conceives that it has conferred on that somewhat rough and remote locality all the advantages of a refined civilization; but I doubt whether the Shappites have been thankful for the favour. The landlord at the inn, for one, is not thankful. Shap had been a place owing all such life as it had possessed to coaching and posting. It had been a stage on the high road from Lancaster to Carlisle, and though it lay high and bleak among the fells, and was a cold, windy, thinly-populated place, – filling all travellers with thankfulness that they had not been made Shappites, nevertheless, it had had its glory in its coaching and posting. I have no doubt that there are men and women who look back with a fond regret to the palmy days of Shap.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Can You Forgive Her?

“So that's troublin' you? I reckon it needn't. You see it was this way. I come round the house an' seen that fat party an' heard him talkin' loud. Then he seen me, an' very impolite goes straight for his gun. He oughtn't have tried to throw a gun on me - whatever his reason was. For that's meetin' me on my own grounds. I've seen runnin' molasses that was quicker'n him. Now I didn't know who he was, visitor or friend or relation of yours, though I seen he was a Mormon all over, an' I couldn't get serious about shootin'. So I winged him - put a bullet through his arm as he was pullin' at his gun. An' he droppped the gun there, an' a little blood. I told him he'd introduced himself sufficient, an' to please move out of my vicinity. An' went" - Lassiter”
― Zane Grey, quote from Riders of the Purple Sage

“And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes

“It is a sad truth, but it is a truth, indeed, that the knowledge of the human species far surpasses their wisdom.”
― Michael Talbot, quote from The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life

“Am struck by paradoxical thought that youth is by no means the happiest time of life, but that most of the rest of life is tinged by regret for its passing, and wonder what old age will feel like, in this respect. (Shall no doubt discover very shortly.)”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady

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