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5fb0be7
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A person never knows what is next--I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.
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Leif Enger |
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9649bdc
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Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards. I'm sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of t..
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Leif Enger |
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c598809
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I made a fist and held it out. It didn't look like much--not like a fist anyone would count on for protection. If war came seeking a person I loved, that undernourished fist was not going to be enough. I would have to put my whole body in the way
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Leif Enger |
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3e03ce1
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Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back.
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Leif Enger |
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1825146
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There is no better sound than whom you adore when they are sleepy and pleased
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Leif Enger |
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49648f3
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A veteran bystander to hard moments, I knew they went by quicker when you were unconscious.
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Leif Enger |
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133fa32
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Not anymore--not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside."
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Leif Enger |
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0e613ac
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What mortal creations are language and memory!
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Leif Enger |
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da88fc5
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Speculators make me nervous," I managed to say in a slow soggy tone. "What needless suspicion," he said. "To speculate is to imagine. To wonder." At least I think that's what he said, before a shape sank past in my murky sight--a watery shape, a descending turtle--and then I knew where I seemed to be, in my honest old Pontiac, ninety feet deep. There sure enough was the ovoid speedometer, there my drifting blue hand. A bit of my brain belie..
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Leif Enger |
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e3007f4
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Of course vindictiveness is an ugly trait and, yes, I do mean to forgive all these nice deserters; I mean, eventually, to say, to their ghosts if not their living faces, It's all right. I understand. I might've done the same. Not yet, though. Let me bear witness first. Two
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Leif Enger |
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3f6fb8b
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Days later under northern skies he understood that its presence in the pickup only made him heartsick and he unloaded it cheap to the farmer, who, though confused by Spanish, understood burdens and the need to escape them.
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Leif Enger |
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a64f342
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The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.
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Leif Enger |
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3d44f3b
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quixotically.
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Leif Enger |
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57980b4
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I wouldn't say that. Shad's a good man. Better than most of us, maybe. But he's ..." I shut my eyes, looked for adjectives, and could come up only with "not reliable," a choice I instantly regretted. Shad had plowed snow twenty years, in dangerous weather, for embarrassing pay. Reliable is exactly what he was. Yet it was also true he had a headful of spiders which woke now and then and altered his personal scenery. Somehow I'd managed to di..
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Leif Enger |
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2043804
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It's never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.
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Leif Enger |
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2179adf
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Waltzer was stirred by the boy's assurance under stress. Waltzer believed in invented destiny and invented some then and there.
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Leif Enger |
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b0b71f6
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I'd have sunk in the car if Marcus Jetty hadn't been doing a little late-season beachcombing. Marcus runs Greenstone Salvage and Tinker, a famous local eyesore of bike frames, tube amps, hula poppers, oil drums, and knobs of driftwood. He was picking along the jagged strand in his raincoat, eye on a fat cork from somebody's herring net, when a car approached on the highway above. He later described the sounds of a whining V6 and thumping ba..
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car-crash
lake-superior
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Leif Enger |
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8211630
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The man on the water stood forty yards out.
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Leif Enger |
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4cb644e
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She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone's nice surprise.
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Leif Enger |
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cd623e7
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one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? (Perhaps it is, but I suspect she's not actually counting on me for an answer.)
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Leif Enger |
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e6f95e8
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I don't have the gift to aptly describe the rest of that evening, except to say it was a Christmas Eve beyond all gasping wishes,
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Leif Enger |
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37e010e
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My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed--though ignoring them will change you also.
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Leif Enger |
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d029681
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No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.
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Leif Enger |
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b830dc6
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Even as we sat, prying lids off milk bottles, we could hear the persecuted cooks banging around back in the kitchen, grandmas barking at each other, preparing the daily grotesque.
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Leif Enger |
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f094c8a
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He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good. Most welcome was his prediction that language would gradually return.
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Leif Enger |
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cc0716f
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A person never knows what is next -- I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.
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Leif Enger |
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751062f
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Sleep that day was a warm pool into which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world.
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Leif Enger |
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8378b9e
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was working the cold up
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Leif Enger |
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087ffe7
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He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good.
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Leif Enger |
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1a2ef40
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Once in school, going down to lunch from our third-floor classroom, Valentino Vail had leaned over the banister without warning and loosed a cataract of orange vomit. The stairway was the usual open stack and Valentino's breakfast just dropped forever, three stories down, touching a good number of lives as it rocketed past and hitting the basement tile with a sound zookeepers must hear sometimes, around the elephants.
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Leif Enger |
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5372872
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At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.
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Leif Enger |
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c275ceb
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He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry.
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Leif Enger |
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aa74e03
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telegram saying, "Existence is great but don't read so much into it."
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Leif Enger |
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5c6e521
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My sister comes on like a box of nails, but her devotion to the mythic is profound.
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Leif Enger |
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342b71d
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dudgeon
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Leif Enger |