Top 30 Ivan Doig Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.”

— Ivan Doig

Featured in: Growing Up Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

2. “I am a writer, not a transcriber.”

— Ivan Doig

3. “The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.”

— Ivan Doig

4. “The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig

6. “Life is mostly freehand.”

— Ivan Doig

7. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

8. “Life is a zigzag journey, they say, not much straight and easy on the way, but the wrinkles in the map, explorers know, smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.”

— Ivan Doig

9. “There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig

11. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig

13. “It’s funny about imagination, how it.”

— Ivan Doig

14. “Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge.”

— Ivan Doig

15. “Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.”

— Ivan Doig

16. “Believe me, I have looked this up, and the roots of fate and faith are not the same. Nonetheless, I picked up my wicker suitcase to follow Herman the German into the Old Faithful Inn.”

— Ivan Doig

17. “Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty”.”

— Ivan Doig

18. “What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time.”

— Ivan Doig

19. “For as long as there are men and women, some things in life will best be done arm in arm, and strolling in a flower garden is one.”

— Ivan Doig

20. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig

22. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

23. “What is Imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can’t the youngster protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over?”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig

25. “Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.”

— Ivan Doig

26. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

27. “Anyone who grows up around farm animals cannot side with a wolf in the long clash of things. But you can be against tormenting any creature.”

— Ivan Doig

28. “There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all.”

— Ivan Doig

29. “What scrunched under our overshoes as we trudged through the stubble of the grainfield was the nasty mix of moistureless snow and windblown dirt that we called “snirt.”

— Ivan Doig

30. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

31. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

32. “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.”

— Ivan Doig

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

— Ivan Doig