Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.

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

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 that was almost unbearable.

“After a man eats, he becomes shy.”

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

Confusedly, Abel’s mind could not quite connect itself either to his sister’s life or to the youth of his children; inside him was a tiny gasp at the ungraspable concept of time going by.

“Not nutty enough. But you’re honest. Oh, thank the gods. I wanted to talk to a person, and here you are a real person, you have no idea how hard it is—to find a real person.”