Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves. Except Sibby had been interested in her, and she had been terribly interested in him. This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

echoes of pain from the silent noises he carried in his head.

But now, for the first time, it occurred to him—could it really be the first time this had occurred to him?—that there was something far more frightening: people who no longer felt pain at all. He had seen it in other men—the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them.

He was a closed book of a man, he inhabited himself with economy,