Leif Enger Quotes

What else exhausts like sustained deception?

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

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.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

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. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

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

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

Routine is worry's sly assassin.

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.

Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing?

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.

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.

I prayed the Lord would sort (my prayers) out and answer as needed. Above all that he would hurry.

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.

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.

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

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

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

When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

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.

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.

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

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.

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

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.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

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

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

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.

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.