Leif Enger Quotes

Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.

We and the world, my children, will always be at war. Retreat is impossible. Arm yourselves.

Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.

Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.

It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in this world.

Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

Where do you think you’re going?” Dr. Nokes demanded…. “What do you have for directions?” And Dad… said, “I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen

What else exhausts like sustained deception?

Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing?

Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else--ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

Of all facial expressions, which is the worst to have aimed at you? Wouldn't you agree it's disgust?

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.

A person never knows what is next--I don't anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry

Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.

This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone's nice surprise.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.

It is one thing to say you're at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with it's crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely.

We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.

When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed--though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that.

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly, and bitterly wept as we bore him along. For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome, we all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong." The Cowboy's Lament

I prayed the Lord would sort (my prayers) out and answer as needed. Above all that he would hurry.

The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced.

When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?

Someday, you know, we're going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions-a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true.

A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.

Sometimes it seems every woman I meet is more than a match for me.

It’s possible to perceive what is coming and still be dumbfounded when it happens.

As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.

Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.

Your tribe is always bigger than you think.

What makes a Samaritan good is the possibility of the lunge.

You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.

...for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sin, you know, and cry tears doing it that are genuine as any.

Yes, yes sir—routine is worry’s sly assassin.

I felt laden. Air itself has weight and mass, and Kansas had the most air of anywhere I'd ever been.

In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.

Once torched by truth... a little thing like faith is easy.

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.

Better is here. Stay, and make it better.

It’s peculiar, to reach your destination,” he told me. “You think you’ll arrive and perform the thing you came for and depart in contentment. Instead you get there and find distance still to go.

But the ruinous thing about growing up is that we stop creating mysteries where none exist, and worse, we usually try to deconstruct and deny the genuine mysteries that remain. We argue against God, against true romance, against loyalty and self-sacrifice.

My sister comes on like a box of nails, but her devotion to the mythic is profound.

When I woke in the dark I was smiling - it's a happy thing to brace for a visit from old friend Envy who then for some reason never shows up.

My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing.

It’s never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.

I experienced an unspooling sense of freedom—genuine antagonism is something I’ve rarely encountered, and it felt good to respond with honesty instead of obsequious scraping.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, golden and so clean it quivers.

trying to keep him from sinking into the marsh of incurious disapproval that swallows so many ancients.

It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.

Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.

You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own

Ann rolled her eyes. She had a marvelous eye roll, refined through long discipline, precise as acupuncture.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all. Virgil Wander

Why am I still surprised when it turns out there is more to the story?

From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and air to fill them with... p 1

A cowboy doesn't ask for much, that's my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory...

There is no better sound than whom you adore when they are sleepy and pleased

Although saying this, I realize it may have been illusory. Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.

He stood and nodded at the great whitening sky. “We’re sure small, wouldn’t you say? Takes the onus off, somehow.

....her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.

Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else - ignorance, for example...Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.

Buttered toast in a sunlit kitchen, a stand of corn and squash out back, a coming reality where sorrow did not draw and quarter them every waking dawn. Is it so much to ask? A three-chord song, a common life? Could we all have that, someday? Could I?

she had a name made to be embroidered on bowling shirts.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

One of the things Rune admired about Lucy was her impractical curiosity. She was writing notes in the margins.

It was wonderful and gauzy, going to sleep that way, like drifting in a small boat over a rippling sea.

These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.

It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

By this time of course reading itself was slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.

Nadine,” said my voice. “You know how people daydream about the Bahamas, with the beaches and palm trees? I don’t know if they really do, no doubt it’s mostly advertising, but you’re the island I think about.

Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?" "Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede. "To make a sale," she added. "And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale--" "Till he needs braille!" "Will you guys desist?" Dad asked.

I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and rune too, even though he would've offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea.

But I shook my head. I just couldn't go with him. Nor could I tell him it wasn't his public mistreatment that stole my breath and blocked my tongue; it was something too mean to explain. It was the fact that Chester the Fester, the worst man I'd ever seen, even worse in his way than Israel Finch, got a whole new face to look out of and didn't even know to be grateful; while I, my father's son, had to be still and resolute and breathe steam to stay alive.

They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again—even now, some years on, they’re still returning. I’m just so glad to see them.

I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw. I’ve been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

Greenstone is cursed. We had mines, but they shut. Ships used to dock, now they sail past. Our water tower comes loose and rolls over people, our congressman gets leprosy, Bob Dylan drives through and gets two flat tires.” Ann glowed as the idea coalesced—she couldn’t have been more incandescent if she’d physically caught fire. “Hard luck! That’s our legacy.

We sat on low stools under time-darkened timbers, and the steam from our cups rose curling into a sunbeam. I had sailed once with Lark years ago. It sealed us forever, that trip, and also made the sea a thing I loved best at a distance. But safe ashore, who is immune to the warmth of rubbed teak, a gimbled bronze lantern, coffee steam rising in sunlight? I admired Erik. I liked his stories. It felt nice to imagine that I, too, wanted a sailboat. I didn't really. I wanted the twisting steam.

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.

Speculators make me nervous,” I managed to say in a slow soggy tone. “What needless suspicion,” he said. “To speculate is to imagine. To wonder.” At least I think that’s what he said, before a shape sank past in my murky sight—a watery shape, a descending turtle—and then I knew where I seemed to be, in my honest old Pontiac, ninety feet deep. There sure enough was the ovoid speedometer, there my drifting blue hand. A bit of my brain believed I was dead, believed in the peace, knew the wavery coffee shop was only the weak invention it turns out a corpse can summon. Relief rinsed through me, followed by a chiding phrase from the past—fight the good fight. Someone important had said that. Had I fought well? I didn’t know, but what did it matter? The fight appeared to be over. Then a merry laugh punctured the shadows.

Don't you ever doubt it?" Davy asked. And in fact I have. And perhaps will again. But here is what happens. I look out the window at the red farm--for here we live, Sara and I, in a new house across the meadow, a house built by capable arms and open lungs and joyous sweat. Maybe I see our daughter, home from school, picking plums or apples for Roxanna; maybe one of our sons. reading on the grass or painting an upended canoe. Or maybe Sara comes into the room--my darling Sara--with Mr. Cassidy's beloved rolls on a steaming plate. Then I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week - a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards. I'm sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word. Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying order and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth. My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear mirales because they fear being changed - though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.