{"author":"Mary Doria Russell","author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell","total_quotes":31,"quotes":[{"text":"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.�.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["bible"],"id":3256,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"The new fashions sold in departmentstores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittancein terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industrythat exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this aswell: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["advertisement","capitalism","propaganda"],"id":7605,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"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.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["inspirational","judaism","life","strength","survival-instinct"],"id":9082,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"Wyatt Earp had been born, and born again, and now there would be a third life, for the iron fist that had seized his soul in childhood had lost its grip at last. The long struggle for control was over, and in its place, he found a wordless acceptance of a truth he'd always known. He was bred to this anger. It had been in him since the cradle. He'd never bullied neighbors or beaten a horse. He'd never punched the front teeth out of a six-year-old's mouth or hit a woman until she begged. But he was no better than his father, and never had been. He was far, far worse.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["anger","tombstone","wyatt-earp"],"id":11514,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["anxiety","mindfulness"],"id":25086,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"For he had never heard anything like it--did not know such music existed in the world--and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There were parts of it like birdsong, and parts like rolling thunder and hard rain, and parts that glittered like fresh snow when the sun comes out and it’s so cold the air takes your breath away. And parts were like a dust devil spinning past, or a cyclone on the horizon, and all of it cried out for words that he had only read in books and had never said aloud.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["music","song"],"id":27361,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["faith","grief","tragedy"],"id":43136,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["inspirational","religious"],"id":60384,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["peace","war"],"id":79516,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"},{"text":"After all, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. Once told him, “Son, sometimes it’s enough just to act less like a shithead.","author":"Mary Doria Russell","tags":["science-fiction"],"id":79693,"author_id":"Mary+Doria+Russell"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":31,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}