Children of God Quotes

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

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

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

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

“The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances, is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

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

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

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

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

“I have heard the songs of many gods, child. Silly gods, powerful gods, and capricious gods, and biddable gods, and dull. Long ago, when you first welcomed us to your household, and fed us and gave us shelter, and invited us to stay, I listened to you say that we are all -- Jana'ata and Runa and H'uman -- children of a God so high that our ranks and our differences are as nothing in his far sight."

Suukmel looked out over the sweep of the valley, dotted now with small stone houses and filled with the sound of voices high and low, home to Runa and to Jana'ata and to the one single outlandish being whom Ha'anala called brother. "I thought then that this was merely a song sung by a foreigner to a foolish girl who believed nonsense. But Taksayu was dear to me, and Isaac was dear to you. I was willing to hear this song, because I had once yearned for a world in which lives would be governed not by lineage and lust and moribund law, but by love and loyalty. In this one valley, such lives are possible," she said. "If it is a mistake to hope for such a world, then it is a magnificent mistake.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

“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, 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, Children of God

“the best man for the job can sometimes be a four-year-old girl.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

“We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything …”
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

“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, 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, Children of God

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

“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, Children of God