Ivan Doig Quotes & Sayings

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

We count by years, but we live by days. — Ivan Doig

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

Hindsight is always through bifocals: it peers specifically instead of seeing whole. — Ivan Doig

People always want to use this damn place, they need a room to hold this meeting or that, you'd think a library was a big beehive. Myself, I don't see why they can't just check out a couple of books and go home and read. But no, they bunch up and want to cram in here and talk the ears off one another half the night. — Ivan Doig

The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done. — Ivan Doig

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

Life is mostly freehand. — Ivan Doig

A song says something to us that we can't hear in any other way. There is a kind of magic to it. Music does not simply soothe the savage breast, it reaches to our better nature, wouldn't we all agree? — Ivan Doig

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word. — Ivan Doig

Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility. — Ivan Doig

have a bunkhouse, but this was the most comfortably close to such a thing since the — Ivan Doig

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

Kiddo,' he said tiredly, 'you have to realize, a sizable number of the population gets its start in a back seat, that's just life. — Ivan Doig

I am a writer, not a transcriber. — Ivan Doig

It's funny about imagination, how it — Ivan Doig

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

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

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 magnitude of Fort Peck in his telling of it gripped me the way the notion of a thirty-year winter had, and Zoe's magical presence in the back room, and the selection of the Medicine Lodge as the most pleasurable of all the saloons in the state, and family fame in newspapers far and wide, and Delano Roberston arriving in a cloud of sheep, the entire cascade of this one-of-a-kind year; the idea of outsize life, the feeling of being present as things happened way beyond ordinary in human experience. I suppose it was something like a mental fever, the headiest kind to have. Ever since Pop consolidated his thinking there in the hallway of the house, where my finger snap still echoed, my imagination and I knew no limits, and at twelve or at any other known age, there is no spell more dizzying. — Ivan Doig

Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty. — Ivan Doig

THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal. — Ivan Doig

In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing. — Ivan Doig

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 university's preponderant "Greek system" - I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me - seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion. — Ivan Doig

Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center. — Ivan Doig

That whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered. — Ivan Doig

Life is wide. There's room to take a new run at it. — Ivan Doig

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

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

my eye lest I be invaded by — Ivan Doig

There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end. — Ivan Doig

NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell. — Ivan Doig

I figured if you're a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full. — Ivan Doig

Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul. — Ivan Doig

Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me — Ivan Doig

Day by day as autumn tanned the valley around us, now with bright frost weather, now with rain carrying the first chill of winter, my father stayed in the dusk of his grief. That sandbagged mood, I understand now, can only have been a kind of battle fatigue-the senses blasted around in him by that morning of death and the thousands of inflicting minutes it was followed by. — Ivan Doig

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

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

Nightly awaits that sweet address
Principality of Sleep
Happy Land of Forgetfullness — Ivan Doig

Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge. — Ivan Doig

Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person. ... I don't have any choice. This stuff I'm talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be. English Creek — Ivan Doig

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

It takes some real hard running to stay in the same place — Ivan Doig

I have read that the finest Persian carpets would have one strand deliberately left astray, to avoid the sin of pride that perfection might bring. — Ivan Doig