Leif Enger Quotes

• “Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.”

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• “Fair is whatever God wants to do.”

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• “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.”

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

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• “We and the world, my children, will always be at war.
  Retreat is impossible.
  Arm yourselves.”

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• “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.”

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• “Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.”

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• “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.”

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• “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 this world.”

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

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• “Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.”

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• “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.”

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• “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.”

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• “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.”

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• “Is there a single person on whom I can press belief?
  No sir.
  All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw.
  I've been there and am going back.
  Make of it what you will.”

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• “Where do you think you’re going?” Dr. Nokes demanded…. “What do you have for directions?” And Dad… said, “I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen”

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• “What else exhausts like sustained deception?”

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• “So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.”

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• “Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing?”

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• “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.”

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

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• “Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.”

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• “Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.”

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• “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.”

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• “A person never knows what is next--I don't anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.”

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