Quotes from Leif Enger

Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.

After the derailment I wondered obsessively about the great whatever. Much seemed to ride on the character of the whatever, including the degree and tenacity of my guilt in the matter. But miles pass, years climb up your shoulders. My insistence on Mom's and Dad's joyous afterlife gradually dimmed.

it's difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously—the labor dissipates your righteous steam—so

Looking back, I have to laugh. You know why Martin Bligh was strenuous? Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

You said yourself they didn't hurt your girl." Waiting, Davy asked, "How many times does a dog have to bite before you put him down?

Not confidence—I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.

Many a night I woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James—oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

The man on the water stood forty yards out.

One of the things Rune admired about Lucy was her impractical curiosity. She was writing notes in the margins.

The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt.

Why am I still surprised when it turns out there is more to the story?

There is nothing wrong with being kissed on the cheek by a sweet round woman in a café after you have nearly died.

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

she had a name made to be embroidered on bowling shirts.

Once in school, going down to lunch from our third-floor classroom, Valentino Vail had leaned over the banister without warning and loosed a cataract of orange vomit. The stairway was the usual open stack and Valentino's breakfast just dropped forever, three stories down, touching a good number of lives as it rocketed past and hitting the basement tile with a sound zookeepers must hear sometimes, around the elephants.

The good thing about complete darkness is you can lie there quietly and let the other person rethink the smart-alecky thing they have just said. With any luck they'll begin to regret it, or possibly they'll believe you have a magnificent rejoinder in mind but are too well-adjusted to use it.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all. Virgil Wander

I don't have the gift to aptly describe the rest of that evening, except to say it was a Christmas Eve beyond all gasping wishes

People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also.

Not anymore—not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

What mortal creations are language and memory!

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

is worry's sly assassin.

Even as we sat, prying lids off milk bottles, we could hear the persecuted cooks banging around back in the kitchen, grandmas barking at each other, preparing the daily grotesque.