Leif Enger Quotes

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

What mortal creations are language and memory!

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 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.

Even as we sat, prying lids off milk bottles, we could hear the persecuted cooks banging around back in the kitchen, grandmas barking at each other, preparing the daily grotesque.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

I wouldn’t say that. Shad’s a good man. Better than most of us, maybe. But he’s … I shut my eyes, looked for adjectives, and could come up only with not reliable, a choice I instantly regretted. Shad...

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 the world.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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....

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

Of course vindictiveness is an ugly trait and, yes, I do mean to forgive all these nice deserters; I mean, eventually, to say, to their ghosts if not their living faces, It’s all right. I understand....

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.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt.

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