" Once, years ago, Alex had been kicked in the gut by a full-grown stallion. The blow had staggered him. For several endless seconds, he hadn’t been able to breathe. His vision had blurred. For a crazy instant, he’d even felt as though his heart had stopped beating. That was how he felt now. As if, for a suspended moment, everything inside him lurched to a stop.

As feeling slowly began to return to his body, pain accompanied it—a relentless, mind-numbing pain centered in his chest. He’d heard people say their hearts were broken. A few times in his life, he had even used the expression himself.
But until now, the saying hadn’t really had meaning. The human heart didn’t actually break, after all. It didn’t come apart, piece by piece, and drop, along with a man’s stomach, to the region of his boots.
Like hell, it didn’t.

Annie Trimble, the town moron. Only she wasn’t a moron at all. She was deaf. Stone-deaf. And, God forgive him, he had been stone-blind. "

― Catherine Anderson , Annie's Song