117 Quotes by Leif Enger

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.

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.

A person can’t regret honesty any more than other unavoidables – a plain face or a poor history.

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.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

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

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.

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

Greenstone is cursed. We had mines, but they shut. Ships used to dock, now they sail past. Our water tower comes loose and rolls over people, our congressman gets leprosy, Bob Dylan drives through and gets two flat tires.” Ann glowed as the idea coalesced – she couldn’t have been more incandescent if she’d physically caught fire. “Hard luck! That’s our legacy.