Top 56 Leif Enger Quotes
#1. 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.
Leif Enger
#2. We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.
Leif Enger
#3. For his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.
Leif Enger
#4. And who doesn't long for the door in the air.
Leif Enger
#5. Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.
Leif Enger
#6. Of all facial expressions, which is the worst to have aimed at you? Wouldn't you agree it's disgust?
Leif Enger
#7. 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.
Leif Enger
#8. Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.
Leif Enger
#9. Once torched by truth, a little thing like faith is easy.
Leif Enger
#10. I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.
Leif Enger
#11. We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,
and bitterly wept as we bore him along.
For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome,
we all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong.
The Cowboy's Lament
Leif Enger
#12. 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.
Leif Enger
#13. What else exhausts like sustained deception?
Leif Enger
#14. 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.
Leif Enger
#15. Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.
Leif Enger
#16. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.
Leif Enger
#17. If you can't talk sense, don't talk at all.
Leif Enger
#18. Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?
Leif Enger
#19. 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
Leif Enger
#20. Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.
Leif Enger
#21. We and the world, my children, will always be at war.
Retreat is impossible.
Arm yourselves.
Leif Enger
#22. You said yourself they didn't hurt your girl."
Waiting, Davy asked, "How many times does a dog have to bite before you put him down?
Leif Enger
#23. When I woke in the dark I was smiling - it's a happy thing to brace for a visit from old friend Envy who then for some reason never shows up.
Leif Enger
#24. Pride is the rope God allows us all.
Leif Enger
#25. He stood and nodded at the great whitening sky. We're sure small, wouldn't you say? Takes the onus off, somehow.
Leif Enger
#26. Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.
Leif Enger
#28. Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.
Leif Enger
#29. So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.
Leif Enger
#30. A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.
Leif Enger
#31. Sometimes it seems every woman I meet is more than a match for me.
Leif Enger
#32. Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing?
Leif Enger
#33. 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.
Leif Enger
#34. Not confidence - I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.
Leif Enger
#35. 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!
Leif Enger
#37. 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.
Leif Enger
#38. 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.
Leif Enger
#39. 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.
Leif Enger
#40. 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.
Leif Enger
#41. 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
Leif Enger
#42. In times of dread it's good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.
Leif Enger
#43. 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.
Leif Enger
#44. Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.
Leif Enger
#45. 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.
Leif Enger
#46. I felt laden. Air itself has weight and mass, and Kansas had the most air of anywhere I'd ever been.
Leif Enger
#47. 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.
Leif Enger
#48. 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?
Leif Enger
#49. A cowboy doesn't ask for much, that's my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory ...
Leif Enger
#50. Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.
Leif Enger
#51. Her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.
Leif Enger
#52. 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.
Leif Enger
#53. I prayed the Lord would sort (my prayers) out and answer as needed. Above all that he would hurry.
Leif Enger
#54. 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.
Leif Enger
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