Tradition was safety; change was danger.

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.

Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.

The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.

When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.

And the hundredth boy?

We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.

When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

At times, the solution to a maze is to reduce it to embers ans walk straight through the ashes.
― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God.

Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. 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.

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.

When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.

The Doc Holliday of legend is a gambler and gunman who appears out of nowhere in 1881, arriving in Tombstone with a bad reputation and a hooker named Big Nose Kate.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

They don't take enough to kill their host, Supaari thought, sorry to have lived through the night, and disgusted by the jointed carapaces, the scuttling gait of the bloated little beasts. They suck blood and give back nothing. That is the way of parasites.

It would not have suprised Emilio Sandoz that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends.  The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.

Who am I to judge a life misspent?

Watching him with one eye, 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.

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.

Cleveland is really good about recognizing its artists because of the Arts Council.

In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.