Eric Umbarger

“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

“Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.”
― 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 never was anyone's parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse