Ivan Doig Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

my eye lest I be invaded by

It's funny about imagination, how it

Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.

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.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

have a bunkhouse, but this was the most comfortably close to such a thing since the

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Life is mostly freehand.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.