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.

“Oh, but, Linda—see, it doesn’t matter where you live. That’s what you find out. When the person you love more than anyone spends his days in a cell, then you’re in a cell too. It doesn’t matter where you are.

that spaciousness of calm: Long ago he’d assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. On his grandfather’s roof as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he’d discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how hard I was hit….And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain.