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fabccb6
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There was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but don't want revenge. [Bessie about James]
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Mary Doria Russell |
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1f9567c
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Home...if there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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98d57e5
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I believe in God the way I believe in quarks," she said coolly. "People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did." --
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Mary Doria Russell |
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f009517
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Cubs fan," John muttered. The Chicagoan's curse. Sandoz pushed a towel aside, eyes wide. "How bad?" "Anybody can have a couple of lousy centuries."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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51d93eb
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Wyatt, I'm from Chicago," Eddie told him. "Let me explain politics to you." --
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Mary Doria Russell |
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e879776
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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."
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strength
life
judaism
survival-instinct
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Mary Doria Russell |
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68c0b61
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Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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8c0042d
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I believe in God the way I believe in quarks,' she said coolly. 'People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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708b769
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Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady's requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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3f4e9fc
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Bein' born is craps. How we live is . Mamma played a bad hand well.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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ced6ebe
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At the risk of descent into unscientific generalization, I must report to you that ninety percent of Texans give the other ten percent a bad name, he told Martha Anne
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Mary Doria Russell |
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f249525
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wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.' " "Then I must be very wisdom. I don't understand anything."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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4eea49d
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That was when it came to him that the only unmixed happiness he could think of was when he quit his job with the city after that fight with Bob Wright. So he told Doc that, too, and said, "I never meant to be a lawman. Stumbled into it, really. When I quit, it was a weight off." Dealing"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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c5cf031
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eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early, the exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0aa9d95
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guess--You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well," said Morgan, "I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness." The"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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260c5ff
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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,..
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song
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0ec7083
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What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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7a35a99
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Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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fac17a9
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In the past few years, he'd worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn't much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. "Wyatt," the man told him, "the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don't kill the customers." Most of the time, it seemed sensible to keep t..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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ebeec82
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an insouciant flip of the wrist--
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Mary Doria Russell |
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d63fa01
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You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love?...You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses...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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99cea32
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Honey," Bessie's mamma used to say, "politicians and judges and coppers are money-grubbing thieves. They'll screw you, and rob you, and win elections for doing it, but there's no way around them. Smile and pay the sonsabitches off." The"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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44bacf9
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I'll take honest arrogance over fake humility any day.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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71966a0
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It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, "Well, you screwed up. Everybody screws up. It's okay." His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life."
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Mary Doria Russell |
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610bc0d
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Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.
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stoicism
mysterious
secrets
childhood
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Mary Doria Russell |
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326ae82
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Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new nation--sovereign and independent--that had just been born. In
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Mary Doria Russell |
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78eed96
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Now, finally, he was in a place where none of that made any difference, where he was simply an Earthman. Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground--to be divided and conquered by his grandparents--but a garden, where each person who'd contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown. For
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Mary Doria Russell |
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4919664
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she was, after all, a practical woman and the daughter of an economist.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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c8fe249
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No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise. "Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed."
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no-children
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Mary Doria Russell |
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276bf7f
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she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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4e259dd
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Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground--to be divided and conquered by his grandparents--but a garden, where each person who'd contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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4558795
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To Robert, he wrote, In Texas, rocks are considered inadequate weaponry during school yard scuffles. Dallas children carry a brace of loaded pistols, a concealed Deringer, and a six-inch toadsticker in one boot. That's the girls, of course. Boys bring howitzers to class.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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fc3c098
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As far as Wyatt Earp knew, it was not illegal to beat a horse. In the past few years, he'd worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn't much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. "Wyatt," the man told him, "the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don't kill..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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908d7ed
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But Schrodinger said that the cat isn't actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead." Nico thought that over. "You could listen to hear if it's purring." Frans"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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698716e
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Now here's my idea about God. I think we're like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man." "Maybe there's a lady," Nico suggested helpfully. Frans"
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Mary Doria Russell |
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c7de8f2
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Hope--cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora's box--smiled on him gently all that summer.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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f2767ed
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And Johannes Voelker is the last man on Earth I'd choose as a spiritual director for Sandoz, he thought. Shit or get off the pot, my son.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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5162c32
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They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with "stomachaches." Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the kapok factory. Hands opaline with infected cuts, gone bad from the bacteria and toxins in the offal at the fish-processing plant. Sepsis, diabetes, melanomas, botched abortions, asthma, TB, malnutrition, STDs. Liquor and drugs and hopelessnes..
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Mary Doria Russell |
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2c03aad
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One thing I can say for certain. There's just no telling whom God will take a liking to.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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a90b1ef
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He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God's love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical, as he caught and repeated as much of what everyone said to him as he could, soaking up the music and cadence, the pattern of phonemes on the fly, gravely accepting and repeating Askama's quiet corrections when he got things wrong.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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41347d0
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Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students--the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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0ee7399
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Isaac didn't understand heartache. Or regret or longing or divided loyalties. Or anger or shattered trust or betrayal. Such things had no clarity. They involved expectations of another's behavior, and Isaac had no such expectations.
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Mary Doria Russell |
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3de7e0c
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out whose side they were on. Even Fat
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Mary Doria Russell |
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cf20443
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tidy up before leaving for the day. When
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Mary Doria Russell |