Dreamers of the Day Quotes

“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.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“The dachshund is a perfectly engineered dog. It is precisely long enough for a single standard stroke of the back, but you aren't paying for any superfluous leg.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Maybe that's the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.
A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological insults. Rain, for example, or a startling gust of wind.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Dachshunds have their own agenda and can be stubborn about seeing their plans through to completion. What Rosie lacked in consistency, she made up for in enthusiasm. Most of the time when I called her name, she sprinted back, her long ears cocked and flying like a little girl's pigtails. Each encounter was a glorious reunion, even if we'd been parted for only a minute or two. I had never felt so loved.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religions into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Abandon a dachshund and upon your return, you may well be confronted with a small token of her displeasure. This, for the dachshund, is an undignified but necessary form of training. Eventually, you will learn your lesson, which is to take you with her everywhere. When you have finally accepted this, you will be generously rewarded for your good behavior by a jaunty, joyful companion.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Dust rises at every step, fine as flour. It is dried river silt, that dust. Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“To leave the apple unpicked—that was sin.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known? When we substitute concurrence for fact, fantasy quickly replaces knowledge. Why? Because knowledge is much more trouble to acquire!”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“For Russian Jews, Zionism was an immediate solution to age-old problems.
“Anywhere is better than Russia,” Karl agreed, “but for Western Jews, Zionism is a trap, I think. Once Jews are permitted a territorial center, it will be too easy to drive the rest of us from every other nation on Earth. ‘Go back where you belong!’ ” he cried dismissively, jerking his thumb toward Palestine. “ ‘Oh, by the way, leave all your possessions behind.’ ”
... But I have no need of some artificial homeland invented by the British. I am not a German Jew, Agnes, but a Jewish German.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer's ear, a bloodred god whispers, "Offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. Rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!"

The rationales warp and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?

"All men dream," Colonel Lawrence wrote, "but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“The new fashions sold in department
stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.
They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance
in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry
that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as
well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—
the advertising industry.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“In 1913, America had a professor-president in the White House -- a man of intelligence and principle, elected to clean up the corruption that had flourished in the much of politics for so long. Public health and public schools were beating back the darkness in slums and settlements. The poor were lifted up and the proud brought down as Progressives reined in the power of Big Money.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“arrived.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“If Abraham Lincoln had erred in allowing the press to criticize the government during our Civil War, Woodrow Wilson vowed, "I won't repeat his mistakes." The president didn't repeal the First Amendment; he had, after all, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution. The press could print what it liked, of course, but the post office didn't have to deliver it. The Wilson administration ordered the confiscation of anything unpatriotic, which is to say, anything critical of his administration. Total war demanded totalitarian power, Mr. Wilson told a compliant Congress. "There are citizens of the United States," the president thundered, "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed."
Anyone who protested or even voiced reluctance was called a traitor.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“The youth and wealth of empires had been poured out onto bloody mud, but Mr. Wilson went to Versailles intending to ask still more of them. His Fourteen Points called not just for free seas, free trade, and arms reduction, and not only for the voluntary withdrawal of all armies from all conquered territories. Why, he demanded the end of all colonial claims! He intended to fight for the right of the whole world's conquered and colonized peoples to determine their own autonomous development. His peace plan was simply this" America writ large.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“But there you are: the reasons for going to war might be a shameless hoax, but the war itself was real, and by God, America was in it!”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“Humiliation is not the same as embarrassment, I realized. If you know yourself to be clumsy and never pretend otherwise, you might well be embarrassed when you trip over your own feet upon entering a room, but you won't be ashamed. You can laugh at yourself and shrug the embarrassment off.

Humiliation by contrast, does not merely require open recognition of an acknowledged foible. Humiliation is a public exposure of some secret vanity ... You discover that not even your own modest opinion of yourself is shared. You are not merely homely but also deluded, and vain, and ridiculous. That is humiliation.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day