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5208fa4
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The strain of a long illness will exhaust the most compassionate.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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856e33a
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They were beaten [bullies]. Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works...That's why a bully will fold. You just... at him, the way his old man did. It's not anger. It's scorn. A bully sees that look? He's nine years old again. Small and weak, like his pa wanted him. It's all he can do to keep from crying. [The hundred boy?] We can go..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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634ea21
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Say what you will about Mormons, but they are very fine dancers.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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9641061
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Your Holiness, we are more than prepared to concede that overpopulation alone is not the sole cause of poverty and misery," Giuliani began. "Fatuous oligarchies," Gelasius suggested. "Ethnic paranoia. Whimsical economic systems. An enduring habit of treating women like dogs ..."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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244c854
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He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it's fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what's out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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60603cf
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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d2fdc78
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Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself. He
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Mary Doria Russell |
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62f6dfb
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Emilio] felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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6d26070
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Do you know what made me fall in love with you?" George asked suddenly. Anne shook her head, puzzled that he should ask her this now. "I heard you laugh, down the hall, just before I got to Spanish class that first day. I couldn't see you. I just heard this fabulous laugh, like a whole octave, top to bottom. And I had to hear it again."
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love
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Mary Doria russell |
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f429bfe
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privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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e53e15c
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His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived. John
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Mary Doria Russell |
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05a08fa
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Your sorrow is of no interest to me," Sandoz said softly. "If you want absolution, go to a priest."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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52a56a4
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The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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7607db4
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A tale begins and where it ends, matters. Who tells the story and why, that makes all the difference.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0621bef
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All the muscles of the palms had been carefully cut from the bones, doubling the length of the fingers, and Sandoz's hands reminded John of childhood Halloween skeletons.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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5f023a5
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Religion - the wishful thinking of an ape that talks! You know what I think?' he asked rhetorically, trying to distract himself from yet another death. 'Random shit happens, and we turn it into stories and call it sacred scripture--
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Mary Doria Russell |
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550f36d
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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3ee9801
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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40c7f86
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He wondered then if Jesus expected gratitude as Lazarus emerged, stinking, from the crypt. Maybe Lazarus was a disappointment to everyone, too.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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7a1b506
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He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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04973fd
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Raise your sights, sugar. Aim low all you'll hit is rats, snakes and rock bottom" from Epitaph"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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24741ba
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Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0380673
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But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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9f82e34
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My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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468c7c3
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I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God's will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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9d2ccc4
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Jimmy was no fool but he'd been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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9f5868a
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I still have a headache powder saved up,
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Mary Doria Russell |
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07efb65
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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a13d774
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Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. " 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' " "But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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5444e78
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You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love?" she asked him. "You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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856646d
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It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne's last night and to receive no plain answers," he said. "Perhaps this is because we can't understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God's ways and God's thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable." Emilio's head came up and he looked at Ma..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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fb21846
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Sailing is the perfect antidote for age, Reyes. Everything you do on a sailboat is done slowly and thoughtfully. Most of the time, an old body is entirely capable of doing whatever needs to be done while you're cruising. And if the sea is determined to teach you a lesson, well, a young back is no more capable than an old one of resisting an ocean, so experience counts more than ever.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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6637f4e
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Giuliani could never understand the price scholarship boys paid for their education: the inevitable alienation from your uncomprehending family, from roots, from your own first person, from the original "I" you once were. Angry, Felipe decided to say nothing more about Emilio Sandoz. Let Giuliani ask the man directly. But the Father General said, "So you memorize the rules and you try not to expose yourself to humiliation." "Yes." "And you ..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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9e5d838
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It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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649af68
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Marc was in charge of the Wolverton tube plant colony and the tilapia tank, which would produce fresh food to supplement the packaged stuff they were bringing.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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f203ddf
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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?"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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4e60d97
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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e2b18fb
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WELL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the Stella Maris is on her way out of the solar system,
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Mary Doria Russell |
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b9b3f44
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hair and crumbs and unidentifiable orts to be vacuumed,
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0cc468d
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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.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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c3392e6
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So much of what he knew about religion struck him as total bullshit; he was disarmed when the fathers freely admitted that some stories were in fact pious fictions. But, judging his character, they dared him to cut through what he called the crap: to find the core of truth, carefully preserved and offered
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Mary Doria Russell |
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a7a355d
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There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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28e7af9
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Anne shrieked with laughter, but George yelled, "I don't suppose we could get a little gravity around here?" and D.W. hollered back, "Nope. All we got is levity." And thus began the first morning of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat. [148]"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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5cc615a
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They spoke then, with the dear and ordinary intimacy of the well-married in the eye of a storm. [369]
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marriage
peace
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Mary Doria Russell |