I Cheerfully Refuse Quotes

“As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Better is here. Stay, and make it better.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“May all hanging judges be judged themselves at last.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Next morning at church the pastor said our beautiful visitor {the Great Comet of 1965} meant war was coming (...). At twelve I was unsure what to make of his sweltering interpretation but noticed a strain of quiet annoyance in my stepmom's demeanor driving home. When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness has like water over smooth stones. She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman's error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“He felt confusion coming. The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“I never was anyone's parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“A romantic fears romance is not enough.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Feral Comportment Continuum.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“When a flame is lit move toward it.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Who will ransom earth and water?
What new son or what new daughter?
Who will make of many, one?
What new daughter? What new son?”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Those who remained forged a cult of rage.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse

“Right away I had the sense this youngster was in a story of his own.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“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, I Cheerfully Refuse