Leif Enger Quotes (15 Quotes)

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

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

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.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.

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 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.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.