Ivan Doig Quotes

Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.

The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.

Life is mostly freehand.

I thought again what an achievement a book is, a magic box simultaneously holding the presence of the author and the wonders of the world.

We count by years, but we live by days.

Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty".

My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going . . . whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.

Life is a zigzag journey, they say, not much straight and easy on the way, but the wrinkles in the map, explorers know, smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.

For as long as there are men and women, some things in life will best be done arm in arm, and strolling in a flower garden is one.

There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all.

There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.

Life is wide. There's room to take a new run at it.

What scrunched under our overshoes as we trudged through the stubble of the grainfield was the nasty mix of moistureless snow and windblown dirt that we called “snirt.

What is Imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can't the youngster protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over?

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.

The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.

Believe me, I have looked this up, and the roots of fate and faith are not the same. Nonetheless, I picked up my wicker suitcase to follow Herman the German into the Old Faithful Inn.

that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered.

Anyone who grows up around farm animals cannot side with a wolf in the long clash of things. But you can be against tormenting any creature.

Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.

Nightly awaits that sweet address Principality of Sleep Happy Land of Forgetfullness

Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge.

What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time.

It came to me more as a whisper of suggestion than the fundamental adage that it is - if this is not biblical, I shall always believe it should be - that all of us need someone who loves us enough to forgive us despite the history.

THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.

It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf.

It’s funny about imagination, how it

If I have learned anything in a lifetime spent overseeing schools, it is that childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.

People come and go in our lives; that's as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever; and that is a fresh saga everytime.

If somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself - to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence - if this is what must be, why is the pattern of remembered instants so uneven, so gapped and rutted and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments of the mind, from childhood. And childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time.

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. —JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

Hooting and hollering, the crowd reliably responded as if that were the height of humor, while Herman slapped me on the back and nearly fell off his gunnysack seat guffawing and I laughed as hard as if I hadn’t heard that mossy joke at every rodeo I had ever been to. Life can tickle you in the ribs surprisingly when it’s not digging its thumb in.

The music of men’s lives’ isn’t as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks,

my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere.

Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility.

The circumference of love depends on the angle you see it from, I learned in the course of that madcap week after Father proposed to Rose.

Latin was not a hard topic at all compared to romance, from what I could see.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me

... hindsight is always through bifocals: it peers specifically instead of seeing whole.

In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.

In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn’t blow your hair off.

She came to the ranch on one of the first pale chilly days of an autumn, hired to cook for us for a few months, and stayed on in our lives for almost three years. Her time with us is a strange season all mist and dusk and half-seen silhouettes, half-heard cries. there is nothing like it in the sortings of my memory.

IN THE BOOK OF LIFE we are chapters in one another’s stories,

I have read that the finest Persian carpets would have one strand deliberately left astray, to avoid the sin of pride that perfection might bring.

The university's preponderant "Greek system"—I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me —seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion.

It is never good news when a parent resorts to your full name.

my eye lest I be invaded by

Gram is . . . is herself again, I’ll have

NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell.

I happily stepped into that role of librarian as bartender of information. Presiding over shelves of intoxicating items, dispensing whatever brand of knowledge was ordered up, I am sure I poured generously.

It is said it takes a good storyteller to turn ears into eyes, but luckily life itself sometimes performs that trick on us.

The saying is that what does not kill you strengthens you, but sometimes you wonder which will happen first.

It takes some real hard running to stay in the same place

As I mounted the stairs, my lips silently tried out the two words “contrary warrior” together.

The magnitude of Fort Peck in his telling of it gripped me the way the notion of a thirty-year winter had, and Zoe's magical presence in the back room, and the selection of the Medicine Lodge as the most pleasurable of all the saloons in the state, and family fame in newspapers far and wide, and Delano Roberston arriving in a cloud of sheep, the entire cascade of this one-of-a-kind year; the idea of outsize life, the feeling of being present as things happened way beyond ordinary in human experience. I suppose it was something like a mental fever, the headiest kind to have. Ever since Pop consolidated his thinking there in the hallway of the house, where my finger snap still echoed, my imagination and I knew no limits, and at twelve or at any other known age, there is no spell more dizzying.

...a vision from when they were young and unmarred by what lay ahead of them in life. Memory does that, unerring as a spotlight.

Was there even any way it sounded legal? The past casts a tricky shadow, I was discovering.

Kiddo,' he said tiredly, 'you have to realize, a sizable number of the population gets its start in a back seat, that's just life.

He pours the drinks for the lost dreamers, eternally swabbing the bar while listening to their stories, ever listening, and, yes, in the end has his own tale. It is my chance to give the performance of a lifetime. After all, I know the character by heart.

Lascaux and Altamira, that's what I want my work to be like. . . . Something people can look back at, whenever, and get a grasp of our time. Another hundred years from now, or a hundred thousand — the amount of time between shouldn't make any difference. If my pictures are done right, people whenever ought to be able to say, 'Oh, that's what was on their minds then.

The past casts a tricky shadow,

siccing

Remembered joy is twice sweet.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner; Some Horses: Essays by Thomas McGuane; Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy; The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana by Rick Bass; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich; She Had Some Horses: Poems by Joy Harjo; The Meadow by James Galvin; The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick; The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists by Gregory Curtis; From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories by Joseph Medicine Crow; The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark

When you are as young as I was then, a world of any kind begins at the outskirt of your imagination, and you populate it with those who have proven themselves to you.

on a ranch I believe I would have been called the choreboy.

So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.

without a basic good glass of beer, properly drawn and presented, a saloon was merely a booze trough. And

Even at her worst she made you think, and that’s worth something in a person.

Grief does not always come out in tears.

PEOPLE COME AND GO in our lives; that’s as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever, and that is a fresh saga every time.

Moxie in the old days had the nerves of a snake handler.

EVEN WHEN IT STANDS VACANT THE PAST IS NEVER EMPTY.

Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring. At the betrothal news Morrie had declared gallantly “I would not want to yield her to anyone but you, Oliver.

Yet, Experience spake, the old ways are best; steadfast for steadfast’s sake, passing the eons’ test.

Tom McGuane, James Welch, A. B. Guthrie, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, Richard Hugo. A who’s who of Montana writers.

If is biggest word there is,

the sound of someone speaking from past the grave.

Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center.

Day by day as autumn tanned the valley around us, now with bright frost weather, now with rain carrying the first chill of winter, my father stayed in the dusk of his grief. That sandbagged mood, I understand now, can only have been a kind of battle fatigue-the senses blasted around in him by that morning of death and the thousands of inflicting minutes it was followed by.

At observation posts and in campgrounds and on logging roads and at picture-taking perches like Coldwater Ridge, vigil keepers caught in the same moment with Sunday larkers, they died and they died. Died they all who were encamped along the north rim of the red zone as the power of Mount St. Helens welled over it, to a sum of fifty-seven.  •

People always want to use this damn place, they need a room to hold this meeting or that, you’d think a library was a big beehive. Myself, I don’t see why they can’t just check out a couple of books and go home and read. But no, they bunch up and want to cram in here and talk the ears off one another half the night.

I figured if you’re a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full.

A song says something to us that we can’t hear in any other way. There is a kind of magic to it. Music does not simply soothe the savage breast, it reaches to our better nature, wouldn’t we all agree?

Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person. … I don’t have any choice. This stuff I’m talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be. English Creek

Language is the treasury of the poor.

to speak that dialect called if

Certain of himself, confident of what he could make in his mind, going through life as if he had always a following wind.

Upon the high seas is the wrong way of saying it, a horizon of ocean makes shallow the place of an onlooker.

THERE ARE MOMENTS in a lifetime when you can taste history as it is happening. When the flavor of time, from one hour to the next, somehow is not quite the same as any day before.

But earth and heart don't have much of a membrane between them. Sometimes decided on grounds as elusive as that single transposable h , this matter of siting ourselves. Of a place insisting itself to us.

America in that agitated time; not merely a nation, but something like a continental nervous condition.

Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring.