"The Sparrow"

[fiefoe]

Mary Doria Russell's book started out very promisingly, but the interminable middle irritated me no end. (Yes, you are mad at your god for gilting you, we get it already.)
It's interesting how this very religious SF book compares with my previous read, "The Book of the New Sun". One coddles the reader and tells too much, the other way too little; both features something akin to cannibalism (or "diabolical transubstantiation" as GW terms it.)

• the less prestigious end of the Jesuit dictum, Publish or Parish"And if a vulture does a poor job on you, you’re immortalized as mediocrity."
• 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.
• Masao Yanoguchi gazed at the open, innocent face and suddenly laughed. "Mr. Quinn," he murmured, not unkindly, "your subtlety is showing."
• the crowd she had just walked through. "As pretty as a vaseful of cut flowers," she remarked, accurate and cool.
• "I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present."
• Feelings are facts. / the word exquisite: tiny and perfect.
• He found he could imagine a time when trees were so abundant that wood could be used freely like this, for decoration, for warmth.
• alight with the simple satisfaction of pleasing children."
• It looks like someplace where you could fall asleep on the sofa." "Aren’t you splendid!"
• Do you think we would have a name for the sin of despair, if only you had experienced it?
• Jimmy said. "Radio implies a lot." "Mass communications," Anne suggested. "And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions."
• she said wryly. "You’re right, Dr. Sandoz. A partially mined asteroid could be used as a vehicle."
• Legitimate bids to reproduce and market the ET music began to flood in to ISAS almost immediately.
• he had a past worthy of the name to reconsider and to turn away from.
• mere considerations of scale suggested that human beings were not the sole purpose of creation.
• "Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own."
• clearsouled and fulfilled / with only a hint of insincerity to protect herself.
• Beaten regularly, his fingers cut off joint by joint with clamshell blades—no wonder Isaac Jogues had come to Emilio’s mind.
• As the months passed, it was increasingly difficult to resist the beauty of belief.
• There were as many ways to lose one’s balance and sense of purpose as there were people who engaged in the struggle.
• "A good-sized moon keeps a planet’s precession steady enough for stable weather patterns to develop. If there’s open water, moons make tides, and tides breed life."
• "Without an ionosphere to contain radio waves, you could only use line-of-sight signals, like microwave towers at home,"
• 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. Flexible, then, and adaptable but not authoritative.