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..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
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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
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How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?Mary Doria Russell
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Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.Mary Doria Russell
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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
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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
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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
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My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.Mary Doria Russell