Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

It seemed the older he grew—and he had grown old—the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.

Linda added, “Have you seen Our Mother who is not yet in Heaven recently? How’s her dippiness factor these days?” Patty said, “I thought I’d go out there this afternoon. It’s been a few days. I need to make sure she’s taking her medicine.” “I don’t care if she takes it,” Linda said, and Patty said she knew that. Then Patty said, “Are you in a bad mood or anything?” “No, I’m not,” Linda said.

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 ...

Now, as Patty drove into her driveway and saw the lights she’d left on, she realized that Lucy Barton’s book had understood her. That was it—the book had understood her. There remained that sweetness of a yellow-colored candy in her mouth. Lucy Barton had her own shame; oh boy did she have her own shame. And she had risen right straight out of it. “Huh,” said Patty, as she turned the car engine off. She sat in the car for a few moments before she finally got out and went inside.

The girl put her head down on her arms on Patty’s desk. Her shoulders shook. In a few minutes she said, looking up, her face wet, “I’m sorry. But when someone’s nice to me— Oh God, it just kills me.” “That’s okay,” Patty said. “No, it’s not.” The girl wept again, steadily and with noise. “Oh God,” she said, wiping at her face. Patty handed her a tissue. “It’s okay. I’m telling you. It is all going to be okay.”

It was the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning in unison, their arms poised at the same place in the sky.

He was suddenly as homesick as a child sent to stay with relatives: when the furniture seemed large and dark and strange, and the smell peculiar, each detail assaultive with a differentness

In a distant way he understood that she had her own echoes of pain—at their age, he supposed, who did not? Then he supposed that many did not. It occurred to him often that many did not have echoes of pain from the silent noises he carried in his head.

in the way of some children who are accustomed to deprivation, she understood little and did as she was told.

People had been spitting in the food of those they served most likely since the beginning of time. Dottie knew from experience that the ease this provided was very short-lived, but then most ease was short-lived, and that is how life was.

He felt the chill of a fluid filling his veins, and so perhaps they had hooked him up to something and given him a drug, he couldn’t find the words to ask— And then later, as the ambulance went faster, Abel felt not fear but a strange exquisite joy, the bliss of things finally and irretrievably out of his control, unpeeled, unpeeling now.

I don’t write a story from beginning to end. I don’t write a book from beginning to end. And I almost don’t write a scene from beginning to end. But I will sit and start a scene, or a piece of a scene. I’ve learned how to do that, so that it will have a heartbeat to it.

It is essential, and I’ve always understood it to be essential. For years I kept thinking, “What is a truthful sentence?” I was trying to write as truthfully as possible, but it was not sounding truthful. It took years—and years and years—of practice and rewriting to know that this is a truthful sentence and that is a truthful sentence—to understand it intuitively. It’s hard to describe what a truthful sentence is; it’s a very awkward thing to discuss. But it has to have all those things in it, and it has to be as direct…as…possible.

Honestly, I think I was born with my creativity in me. And I think I was born with intuition. I could understand things even though I didn’t understand much about the world. I could understand things, like about the human heart, from a very young age.