Leif Enger Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Leif Enger
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
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.

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

Leif Enger
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.

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

Leif Enger
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.

Leif Enger