Top 140 Leif Enger Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 3

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

— Leif Enger

102. “Feral Comportment Continuum.”

— Leif Enger

103. “Existence is great but don’t read so much into it.”

— Leif Enger

104. “May all hanging judges be judged themselves at last.”

— Leif Enger

105. “I’ve always admired the unhurried.”

— Leif Enger

106. “Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.”

— Leif Enger

107. “We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking? When the sun rises we’ll know what to do.”

— Leif Enger

108. “I knew he used to call the old man Saturday mornings to talk baseball or politics, trying to keep him from sinking into the marsh of incurious disapproval that swallows so many ancients.”

— Leif Enger

109. “Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

— Leif Enger

110. “At bottom, what God seemed to want was affirmation. Basically praise in every circumstance. Without it he could turn menacing in a hurry.”

— Leif Enger

111. “What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.”

— Leif Enger

112. “Right away I had the sense this youngster was in a story of his own.”

— Leif Enger

113. “By this time of course reading itself was slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.”

— Leif Enger

114. “Burdens accrue in isolation.”

— Leif Enger

115. “These thieves and lovers and wandering poets – what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.”

— Leif Enger

116. “I’m still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again.”

— Leif Enger

117. “He meant to take Flower down the Soo, through the Greats and clear to the salt.”

— Leif Enger

118. “It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.”

— Leif Enger

119. “When a flame is lit move toward it.”

— Leif Enger

120. “As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.”

— Leif Enger

121. “We understood the margins where we lived. Some still enjoyed resenting the far-flung coasts for their gleam and influence, but I think we all accepted the grace of the overlooked.”

— Leif Enger

122. “It slowed my pulse to believe in a quiet far-off scientist staying with his work.”

— Leif Enger

123. “She seemed to belong here, though maybe she was the sort to belong wherever she was at the time.”

— Leif Enger

124. “I had been slipshod and revealed my cards. That alone was probably enough to spoil whatever cosmic narrative I’d struggled to maintain.”

— Leif Enger

125. “Better is here. Stay, and make it better.”

— Leif Enger

126. “I never was anyone’s parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me.”

— Leif Enger

127. “We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking?”

— Leif Enger

128. “Those who remained forged a cult of rage.”

— Leif Enger

129. “It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.”

— Leif Enger

130. “Lark and I had media once – internet, TV, the vivid suspect world delivered secondhand, ready always to predict our moods and sell us better ones – but we were early abandoners.”

— Leif Enger

131. “Buttered toast in a sunlit kitchen, a stand of corn and squash out back, a coming reality where sorrow did not draw and quarter them every waking dawn. Is it so much to ask? A three-chord song, a common life? Could we all have that, someday? Could I?”

— Leif Enger

132. “He felt confusion coming. The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.”

— Leif Enger

133. “I’d lived years without a woman to tell me small things. Her work went well and she wanted to say so, and I was the man who was listening. That fact swung open and light came in.”

— Leif Enger

134. “We sat on low stools under time-darkened timbers, and the steam from our cups rose curling into a sunbeam. I had sailed once with Lark years ago. It sealed us forever, that trip, and also made the sea a thing I loved best at a distance. But safe ashore, who is immune to the warmth of rubbed teak, a gimbled bronze lantern, coffee steam rising in sunlight? I admired Erik. I liked his stories. It felt nice to imagine that I, too, wanted a sailboat. I didn’t really. I wanted the twisting steam.”

— Leif Enger

135. “I remember she insisted on reading aloud a longish poem about loving a person who wasn’t there and hadn’t been there in a long time and wasn’t likely to be there ever again.”

— Leif Enger

136. “I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”

— Leif Enger

137. “A romantic fears romance is not enough.”

— Leif Enger

138. “Don’t fear occasional ghosts. Every day my mind suggests two or three impossible things.”

— Leif Enger

139. “You try to occupy this actual world but man there is always a Douglas, always someone ready to fly his pants and call them a flag.”

— Leif Enger

140. “Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.”

— Leif Enger