Leif Enger Quotes

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good.

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

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...

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

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.

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....

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

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

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...

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

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

She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.

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