Quotes from Ivan Doig

It came to me more as a whisper of suggestion than the fundamental adage that it is - if this is not biblical, I shall always believe it should be - that all of us need someone who loves us enough to forgive us despite the history.

that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered.

If I have learned anything in a lifetime spent overseeing schools, it is that childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.

It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf.

It's funny about imagination, how it

Hooting and hollering, the crowd reliably responded as if that were the height of humor, while Herman slapped me on the back and nearly fell off his gunnysack seat guffawing and I laughed as hard as if I hadn't heard that mossy joke at every rodeo I had ever been to. Life can tickle you in the ribs surprisingly when it's not digging its thumb in.

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. —JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.

Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility.

Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me

The circumference of love depends on the angle you see it from, I learned in the course of that madcap week after Father proposed to Rose.

Latin was not a hard topic at all compared to romance, from what I could see.

hindsight is always through bifocals: it peers specifically instead of seeing whole.

She came to the ranch on one of the first pale chilly days of an autumn, hired to cook for us for a few months, and stayed on in our lives for almost three years. Her time with us is a strange season all mist and dusk and half-seen silhouettes, half-heard cries. there is nothing like it in the sortings of my memory.

The music of men's lives' isn't as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks

In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn't blow your hair off.

People come and go in our lives; that's as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever; and that is a fresh saga everytime.

my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere.

Grief does not always come out in tears.

my eye lest I be invaded by

PEOPLE COME AND GO in our lives; that's as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever, and that is a fresh saga every time.

America in that agitated time; not merely a nation, but something like a continental nervous condition.