Children of God (The Sparrow, #2)

by Mary Doria Russell

THERE WERE QUESTIONS THAT COULD NOT BE ASKED, AND THE MOST powerful of these was, “Why?” “What?” and “When?” were necessary, of course. “Where?” was usually safe. “How?” was permissible, although it often led to trouble. But “Why?” was so hazardous that Selikat beat him when he used the word.

“Do you hate him that much?” Danny asked curiously as Giuliani’s hand touched the door. “Or does he just scare you so bad, you don’t even want to share a planet with him?”

“Now there’s a novel approach to parenting! Have two kids, and concentrate on ruining one.”

Flowers and four words: “I need some time.” That implied something, didn’t it? It wasn’t all in her head. She had the note.

My body is healed, he was asking her to understand; my soul is still bleeding. It’s all one thing to me.

There were many kinds of loneliness, she discovered. There was the loneliness that came from understanding but not being understood. There was the loneliness of having no one to banter or argue with, no one to be challenged by. Loneliness at night was different from the daylight loneliness that sometimes overwhelmed her in the midst of a crowd. She became a connoisseur of loneliness,

“Wisdom: true knowing,” she explained. “Anne said wisdom begins when you discover the difference between ‘That doesn’t make sense’ and ‘I don’t understand.’ ”

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.”

As an undergraduate, I would look at satellite images of the planet at night, and the connected concentrations of city lights looked to me like streptococcus taking over a petri dish. I became convinced that Homo sapiens was a disease that was ravaging its hostess, Gaia.

nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had 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.

If anything could prove the existence of the soul, he thought, it is the utter emptiness of a corpse.