Quotes from Ivan Doig

EVEN WHEN IT STANDS VACANT THE PAST IS NEVER EMPTY.

People always want to use this damn place, they need a room to hold this meeting or that, you'd think a library was a big beehive. Myself, I don't see why they can't just check out a couple of books and go home and read. But no, they bunch up and want to cram in here and talk the ears off one another half the night.

Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center.

NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell.

I figured if you're a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full.

Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person. … I don't have any choice. This stuff I'm talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be. English Creek

Moxie in the old days had the nerves of a snake handler.

Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring. At the betrothal news Morrie had declared gallantly "I would not want to yield her to anyone but you, Oliver.

Kiddo,' he said tiredly, 'you have to realize, a sizable number of the population gets its start in a back seat, that's just life.

A song says something to us that we can't hear in any other way. There is a kind of magic to it. Music does not simply soothe the savage breast, it reaches to our better nature, wouldn't we all agree?

Lascaux and Altamira, that's what I want my work to be like. . . . Something people can look back at, whenever, and get a grasp of our time. Another hundred years from now, or a hundred thousand — the amount of time between shouldn't make any difference. If my pictures are done right, people whenever ought to be able to say, 'Oh, that's what was on their minds then.

Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring.

At observation posts and in campgrounds and on logging roads and at picture-taking perches like Coldwater Ridge, vigil keepers caught in the same moment with Sunday larkers, they died and they died. Died they all who were encamped along the north rim of the red zone as the power of Mount St. Helens welled over it, to a sum of fifty-seven.  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

The past casts a tricky shadow

Remembered joy is twice sweet.

Day by day as autumn tanned the valley around us, now with bright frost weather, now with rain carrying the first chill of winter, my father stayed in the dusk of his grief. That sandbagged mood, I understand now, can only have been a kind of battle fatigue-the senses blasted around in him by that morning of death and the thousands of inflicting minutes it was followed by.

I have read that the finest Persian carpets would have one strand deliberately left astray, to avoid the sin of pride that perfection might bring.

He pours the drinks for the lost dreamers, eternally swabbing the bar while listening to their stories, ever listening, and, yes, in the end has his own tale. It is my chance to give the performance of a lifetime. After all, I know the character by heart.

Even at her worst she made you think, and that's worth something in a person.

IN THE BOOK OF LIFE we are chapters in one another's stories

a vision from when they were young and unmarred by what lay ahead of them in life. Memory does that, unerring as a spotlight.

THERE ARE MOMENTS in a lifetime when you can taste history as it is happening. When the flavor of time, from one hour to the next, somehow is not quite the same as any day before.

Gram is . . . is herself again, I'll have

to speak that dialect called if