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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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"

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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere.”
― Ivan Doig, Work Song

“THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.”
― Ivan Doig, Last Bus to Wisdom

“People come and go in our lives; that's as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever; and that is a fresh saga everytime.”
― Ivan Doig, The Bartender's Tale