Ivan Doig > Quotes

“Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

“The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.”
― Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

“Life is mostly freehand.”
― Ivan Doig, The Sea Runners

“We count by years, but we live by days.”
― Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair

“I thought again what an achievement a book is, a magic box simultaneously holding the presence of the author and the wonders of the world.”
― Ivan Doig, Sweet Thunder

“Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty".”
― Ivan Doig

“My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going . . . whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

“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, Last Bus to Wisdom

“Life is wide. There's room to take a new run at it.”
― Ivan Doig, English Creek

“There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all.”
― Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair

“There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.”
― Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

“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, Work Song

“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, The Whistling Season: A Historical Literary Novel That Celebrates Joy and Beauty in 1909 Montana

“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, Last Bus to Wisdom

“If somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself - to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence - if this is what must be, why is the pattern of remembered instants so uneven, so gapped and rutted and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments of the mind, from childhood. And childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time.”
― Ivan Doig "This House of Sky"

“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, Last Bus to Wisdom

“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, The Eleventh Man

“Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.”
― Ivan Doig, The Eleventh Man

“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

“that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season: A Historical Literary Novel That Celebrates Joy and Beauty in 1909 Montana

“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

“Nightly awaits that sweet address
Principality of Sleep
Happy Land of Forgetfullness”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

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

“Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge.”
― Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

“Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination.”
― Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season

“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, Last Bus to Wisdom

“It’s funny about imagination, how it”
― Ivan Doig, Last Bus to Wisdom

“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, The Whistling Season: A Historical Literary Novel That Celebrates Joy and Beauty in 1909 Montana

“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, Work Song

“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, Last Bus to Wisdom