Top 100 Leif Enger Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

3. “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.”

— Leif Enger

4. “Fair is whatever God wants to do.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

6. “Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.”

— Leif Enger

7. “Routine is worry’s sly assassin.”

— Leif Enger

8. “Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.”

— Leif Enger

9. “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.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

11. “The drink was a storm cloud with coffee thundering around inside it.”

— Leif Enger

12. “So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.”

— Leif Enger

13. “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.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

15. “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 the world.”

— Leif Enger

16. “And who doesn’t long for the door in the air.”

— Leif Enger

17. “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.”

— Leif Enger

18. “People fear miracles because they fear being changed – though ignoring them will change you also.”

— Leif Enger

19. “Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

21. “Pride is the rope God allows us all.”

— Leif Enger

22. “What else exhausts like sustained deception?”

— Leif Enger

23. “When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

— Leif Enger

24. “It made me think of Penelope waiting for Odysseus – Penelope at her loom, not missing a trick, lumpen suitors everywhere.”

— Leif Enger

25. “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.”

— Leif Enger

26. “You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless – for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

29. “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.”

— Leif Enger

30. “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.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

32. “You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that – if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own.”

— Leif Enger

33. “Make of that what you will.”

— Leif Enger

34. “How could we not believe the Lord would guide us? How could we not have faith? For the foundation had been laid in prayer and sorrow. Since that fearful night, Dad has responded with the almost impossible work of belief. He had burned with repentence as though his own hand had fired the gun. He had laid up prayer as if with a trowel.”

— Leif Enger

35. “He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good. Most welcome was his prediction that language would gradually return.”

— Leif Enger

36. “Nadine,” said my voice. “You know how people daydream about the Bahamas, with the beaches and palm trees? I don’t know if they really do, no doubt it’s mostly advertising, but you’re the island I think about.”

— Leif Enger

37. “Your tribe is always bigger than you think.”

— Leif Enger

38. “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.”

— Leif Enger

39. “Once torched by truth... a little thing like faith is easy.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

41. “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.”

— Leif Enger

42. “What makes a Samaritan good is the possibility of the lunge.”

— Leif Enger

43. “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.”

— Leif Enger

44. “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.”

— Leif Enger

45. “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.”

— Leif Enger

46. “Nothing could quiet a happy crowd of kids like Mr. Holgren’s unannounced appearance – he loved superintending; he was made for it. So when he marched in that morning with a determined look on his face, we froze. Boys and girls recognize sinister as handily as dogs do. Here it was. My best guess now is he’d got it in his head to try “relating” to us – but when he produced a paper pilgrim’s hat from behind his back and put it on his own head, I think we all nearly bolted.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

48. “Sleep that day was a warm pool in which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world.”

— Leif Enger

49. “Ann rolled her eyes. She had a marvelous eye roll, refined through long discipline, precise as acupuncture.”

— Leif Enger

50. “Dad and Roxanna were talking lightly in the way adults do who’ve just shifted gears to accommodate children – an infuriating tone for kids attempting to sound the future.”

— Leif Enger