Samantha Hunt Quotes

People can make beautiful mistakes, dear, and each one is an arrow, a brilliant arrow, pointing out the right way to there.

The color blue fills the entire mirror and, watching it, I think that is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever.

I don't think you'll believe what I found," he says. "A word, razbliuto. We don't have a word to match it but we should. We should develop it tonight because the word means, 'the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.' "Hate?" Jude says.
"No, not that feeling," my grandfather answers and looks and Jude with disappointment.
"Betrayal," my mother says without looking away from her book.
"No," my grandfather says. "It's the little house loved moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. the lover see the old love moving and it looks like it's alive again."
They are all wrong. There's a reason why we have no word for it. You don't get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you've washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.

There are no good guys or bad guys. Not really

It seems the loneliest place in the world for something so lovely.

Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.

We were tired of living in a house.

It's where a thing can't be beautiful or perfect without an imperfection. Say,

I'm the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day.

I am not from Venus. . . . I am from a small town on the Serbo-Croation border.

Perfection scribbled out or the imperfection that makes you, me, anyone perfect and complete because it includes the truth of our mortality. Get

Humans are so good at imagining things, they invent gods who feel so real, they then betray us by not existing.

He gave me an inside of ice so I'd never love you. But it didn't work. You are so close. You are the only warm thing to me. So warm, I am melting.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

The Father wears natural-fiber clothing that he scrubs and starches before re-ruffling in an approximation of ancient Jerusalem chic. Every morning the Father braids his long hair, smoothing the split ends with beeswax. He coats his skin with a homebrewed sunscreen. He takes a spoonful of ground flaxseed and a spoonful of turmeric powder in his nightly goat's milk. He self-administers a coffee colonic on the fifteenth of each month. On the sixteenth, he reports any visions experienced during the purge. And every now and then, he loses control, drinking nothing but Canadian whiskey for three days. The

Art isn't a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Beauty doesn't equal art, and it can't just be the world in a package. It's got to take the world and mess it up some. Add the artifice as a lens, right?

Religions need women. Who else would do all the work?

he asks me, as if Ruth's become invisible. That's fucked up but that's what happens to women. We grow up into ghosts. No one wants to screw Ruth anymore so she's invisible.

I glimpsed a huge beyond when I became a mother, the enormity of an abyss or the opposite of an abyss, the idea of complete fullness, the anti-death, tiny gods everywhere. But now all the world wants to hear of me is how I juggle children and career, how I manage to get the kids to eat their veggies, how I lost the weight. I will never lose this weight. When one encounters a mother doing too many things perfectly, smiling as if it is all so easy, so natural, we should feel a civic responsibility to slap her hard across the face, to scream the word Stop! Stop! So many times the woman begins to chant or whimper the word along with us. Once she has been broken, take her in your arms until the trembling and self-hatred leave her body. It is our duty. I used to think it was motherhood that loosens a woman's grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, fear. Something we can't yet see.

You don't get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you've washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea.

as if being born a girl makes her responsible for everyone alive.

Millions of stars overhead make the violence of the Big Bang clear. So much force that matter is still sprinting away from the center. I

Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do? Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn't they just be the same confused people they were before they died?

Heaven is a dream of Disneyland for those unable to act here on Earth.

Oh, I'm real. I'm the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day. You see what I'm talking about? Then once you have the boundaries of history and fiction secure, where does everything else fall? Somewhere in between the two. History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other. Mother, father. Birth, death, and in between, that's where you find religion. That's where you find art, science, engineering. It's where things get made from belief and memory.

Wait," I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone's a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary.

She's not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.

There isn't any point to it. I'm not getting anywhere. No start, middle, or end. The children scream and I scream, and the noise we make goes out and down and round and round and round.

Unlock the door?' he asks.

This family is an experiment, the biggest I've ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?

'Unlock the door,' he says again. 'Please.'

I release the lock. I open the door. That's the best definition of love.

I've been forgotten here. Left alone talking to lightning storms, studying the mysterious patterns the dust of dead people makes as it floats through the last light of day.

there's nothing scary about dead people. It is the living who terrify.

A man who has to forge his own tools, his own language, is a man who is going somewhere.

Like likes like." When

Some people enjoy humiliation. Maybe I used to be one of those people, but I don't feel humiliation anymore. The body sloughs off cells every day, aging. After all that, what is left to feel humiliated? Very little indeed.

I would think a person who doesn't know what's she's running from can't really be on the run, but that's not true. Here

For her, Mr. Splitfoot is a two that is sometimes a one, mothers and their children, Nat and Ruth, life and death. "Are

These woods are where silence has come to lick its wounds.

When Scout finds Boo Radley hiding behind her bedroom door, she says something that is scary because it is calm. Something like, "Why, there's the man right there, Mr. Tate." Or whatever his name is. Scout's not surprised to find a hollow-eyed monster in the form of Robert Duvall behind her door. She opens a line into magic, possibility. Or mystery, that's a better word than magic. Like an open hole in the ground no one noticed until Scout pointed it out, a place where men with dark secrets live behind every bedroom door. Scout's calm voice says, "The rest of you are blind.

For people my age, including me, if we don't post it, it never happened. People's