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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What else exhausts like sustained deception?

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Your tribe is always bigger than you think.

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

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

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!

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

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

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless - for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.

Sleep that day was a warm pool in which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world.

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

He had a hundred merry crinkles at his eyes and a long-haul sadness in his shoulders.

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.

And who doesn't long for the door in the air.

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.

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

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.

You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It’s why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes.

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

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.

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.

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 made a fist and held it out. It didn't look like much—not like a fist anyone would count on for protection. If war came seeking a person I loved, that undernourished fist was not going to be enough. I would have to put my whole body in the way

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.

Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus--past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow rookf of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone.

Not anymore—not exactly.” If I’d had more words, I’d have described Greenstone’s last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically “open,” the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner’s grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

Nothing could quiet a happy crowd of kids like Mr. Holgren's unannounced appearance -- he loved superintending; he was made for it. So when he marched in that morning with a determined look on his face, we froze. Boys and girls recognize sinister as handily as dogs do. Here it was. My best guess now is he'd got it in his head to try "relating" to us -- but when he produced a paper pilgrim's hat from behind his back and put it on his own head, I think we all nearly bolted.

Oh, his speed was no shock—speed was never Alec’s problem. It was his precision that astonished. Because listen: How many pitchers in any league have a fastball with its own nickname? And what kind of fastball earns the name Mad Mouse? I will tell you: the kind that twists in crackling without one notion where it’s going. The kind you don’t see but hear hissing to itself like the bottle rocket before the bang.

...as long as we have the choice to read what we want, I suspect Twain and Homer and the rest will always be with us. The stoutest old writers ebb and flow in popularity; tastes and political correctness and educational trends also ebb and flow, and we have a tendency to embrace the short view because it makes better news stories. So the joy of literature may not be at a high water mark right now, and yet you can walk into the Target store of your choice and pick up Catcher in the Rye. Beauty floats, I guess, along with sorrow and hope. (http://www.wab.org/events/allofroches...)

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.

Avoiding my eyes he said a rumor had started that I didn’t make it, that I died in the lake, so he drove out to where it happened and sure enough someone had hung a twist of flowers on the torn fence. Carnations and baby’s breath. There was a white plastic cross and a laminated photo saying, “Virgil Wander RIP.” While he poked around, a little scorched-haired lady arrived in a Chevy pickup and marched to the brink with a rosary. When Tom revealed I was alive she wrapped it around her fist in annoyance and sped off dragging a veil of smoke.

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.

It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while . . . and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine. We serve a patient God. . . . Andreeson, who I’d despised, now appeared to my mind as he might’ve to a worried brother. Talk about an unwelcome change. There in the cold, curled against Mr. Ford’s sighing horse, I repented of hatred in general and especially that cultivated against the putrid fed. A pain started up, as of live coals inside, and like that I knew where he was. Knew, with certainty, why he hadn’t come back out of the blizzard. I began to weep. Not only for Andreeson—weeping seems to accompany repentance most times. No wonder. Could you reach deep in yourself to locate that organ containing delusions about your general size in the world—could you lay hold of this and dredge it from your chest and look it over in daylight—well, it’s no wonder people would rather not.