Leif Enger Quotes

You know what you're getting here," I said. "I'm still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again."
"None of us are unabridged, as you are well aware.

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

A person can't regret honesty any more than other unavoidables - a plain face or a poor history.

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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.

But these activities - whining about what's fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle - these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into its circle.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I sighed. Don't let anyone tell you that looking out for your vulnerable is less than a full-time deal.

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.

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

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!

was working the cold up

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

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

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

...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...)

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.

I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land. Here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm.

It took a long while to traverse the orchard. I began to feel hungry but didn't pause; though all this fruit appeared perfectly available, I felt prodded to appear before the master. The place had a master! Realizing this, I know he was already aware of me - comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember abut him - the way he'd planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand. I kept moving.

Could a person believe so strongly one way, yet take the opposite route?

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.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

Your tribe is always bigger than you think.

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

Dad and Roxanna were talking lightly in the way adults do who've just shifted gears to accommodate children - an infuriating tone for kids attempting to sound the future.

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

SOON, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. VERY SOON! he added, clasping my hands; then, unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. The stream was singing aloud, and I heard him singing with it until he dropped away over the edge.

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

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 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.

Make of that what you will.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Not confidence - I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.

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.

If you can't talk sense, don't talk at all.

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

After the derailment I wondered obsessively about the great whatever. Much seemed to ride on the character of the whatever, including the degree and tenacity of my guilt in the matter. But miles pass, years climb up your shoulders. My insistence on Mom's and Dad's joyous afterlife gradually dimmed.