Leif Enger Quotes

I'd have sunk in the car if Marcus Jetty hadn't been doing a little late-season beachcombing. Marcus runs Greenstone Salvage and Tinker, a famous local eyesore of bike frames, tube amps, hula poppers,...

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.

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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 p...

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

Waltzer was stirred by the boy’s assurance under stress. Waltzer believed in invented destiny and invented some then and there.

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

Quixotically.

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

Dudgeon

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.

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 rath...

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...

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.

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