Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

as the men were gathering by the door.

“We don’t know what it means,” her mother said. “We don’t know what anything means in this whole world. But I know what I knew when I saw you. And I know you have always made me so happy. I know you are my dearest little angel.” (She did not say, and only fleetingly did she think: And you have always taken up so much space in my heart that it has sometimes felt to be a burden.)

Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be.