Top 100 Leif Enger Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You know how it is – you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It’s why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes.”

— Leif Enger

52. “They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again – even now, some years on, they’re still returning. I’m just so glad to see them.”

— Leif Enger

53. “This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.”

— Leif Enger

54. “There is no better sound than whom you adore when they are sleepy and pleased.”

— Leif Enger

55. “In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.”

— Leif Enger

56. “You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

58. “Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus – past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow rookf of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone.”

— Leif Enger

59. “I experienced an unspooling sense of freedom – genuine antagonism is something I’ve rarely encountered, and it felt good to respond with honesty instead of obsequious scraping.”

— Leif Enger

60. “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.”

— Leif Enger

61. “It’s never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.”

— Leif Enger

62. “Waltzer was stirred by the boy’s assurance under stress. Waltzer believed in invented destiny and invented some then and there.”

— Leif Enger

63. “Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.”

— Leif Enger

64. “I felt laden. Air itself has weight and mass, and Kansas had the most air of anywhere I’d ever been.”

— Leif Enger

65. “He had a hundred merry crinkles at his eyes and a long-haul sadness in his shoulders.”

— Leif Enger

66. “He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good.”

— Leif Enger

67. “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.”

— Leif Enger

68. “Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.”

— Leif Enger

69. “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!”

— Leif Enger

70. “His coat was open wing and wing but he was radiant with talk, and the wind blew over his big besmirched cheeks and exposed earlobes with no effect. He was like a small, hot, talkative planet.”

— Leif Enger

71. “My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing.”

— Leif Enger

72. “He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

74. “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.”

— Leif Enger

75. “She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.”

— Leif Enger

76. “The man on the water stood forty yards out.”

— Leif Enger

77. “I’d long thought of her as an unfading Penelope, but that was the lazy eye of infatuation. In truth she’d aged more than the decade elapsed since Alec disappeared. Yet somehow the years revealed her strength. Like a willow she turned all weathers to advantage.”

— Leif Enger

78. “It’s possible to perceive what is coming and still be dumbfounded when it happens.”

— Leif Enger

79. “The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced.”

— Leif Enger

80. “What mortal creations are language and memory!”

— Leif Enger

81. “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.”

— Leif Enger

82. “At that moment there was nothing – no valiant history or hopeful future – half worth my sister’s pardon. Listening to Dad’s guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.”

— Leif Enger

83. “I made a fist and held it out. It didn’t look like much – not like a fist anyone would count on for protection. If war came seeking a person I loved, that undernourished fist was not going to be enough. I would have to put my whole body in the way.”

— Leif Enger

84. “Days later under northern skies he understood that its presence in the pickup only made him heartsick and he unloaded it cheap to the farmer, who, though confused by Spanish, understood burdens and the need to escape them.”

— Leif Enger

85. “Sometimes it seems every woman I meet is more than a match for me.”

— Leif Enger

86. “Large tomatoes and inner tranquillity are a bewitching combination.”

— Leif Enger

87. “Although saying this, I realize it may have been illusory. Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.”

— Leif Enger

88. “A veteran bystander to hard moments, I knew they went by quicker when you were unconscious.”

— Leif Enger

89. “Oh, his speed was no shock – speed was never Alec’s problem. It was his precision that astonished. Because listen: How many pitchers in any league have a fastball with its own nickname? And what kind of fastball earns the name Mad Mouse? I will tell you: the kind that twists in crackling without one notion where it’s going. The kind you don’t see but hear hissing to itself like the bottle rocket before the bang.”

— Leif Enger

90. “It was wonderful and gauzy, going to sleep that way, like drifting in a small boat over a rippling sea.”

— Leif Enger

91. “But these activities – whining about what’s fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle – these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into its circle.”

— Leif Enger

92. “Of course vindictiveness is an ugly trait and, yes, I do mean to forgive all these nice deserters; I mean, eventually, to say, to their ghosts if not their living faces, It’s all right. I understand. I might’ve done the same. Not yet, though. Let me bear witness first. Two.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

94. “His sadness seemed complete. It had left him nothing, no proper enjoyment, no Saturday mornings. Sadness wore him like a tailored suit.”

— Leif Enger

95. “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.”

— Leif Enger

96. “He had an advanced capacity for hatred. It came to him easily and fully formed.”

— Leif Enger

97. “I sighed. Don’t let anyone tell you that looking out for your vulnerable is less than a full-time deal.”

— Leif Enger

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

— Leif Enger

99. “I saw it happening but could not stop it. Humility came to me too late. I’m a living proverb; learn from me.”

— Leif Enger

100. “My sister comes on like a box of nails, but her devotion to the mythic is profound.”

— Leif Enger