Quotes from Laird Hunt

Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, 'Right this way.' Well, here I come.

A tale is a funny thing, and even when it's your own and you have a quill in your hand you must be careful where you touch it.

I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run. I said all this to my dead mother, spoke it down through the dirt: there was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark.

For there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do.

There was magic in wanting to see a thing that has been marvelously described.

She had often thought of Anne Frank, who had stuffed her short life with so much wonder, while here she was, having been granted many more years, just going through the motions like she was a ten-penny wind-up doll.

You could get whiplash trying to watch time go by.

But a quill on paper was different from a stick on the bottom of a stream or a fingertip on my forearm. Its scratch was like the dry sparking of a flint and a page with fresh marks on it like a blazing porcupine. A tale written down must be like that , I thought. It must be like the block of wood of the body sprouting tiny tongues of fire and who knows where the next one will rise and burn.

It occurred to her then that it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead—her, Noah, Opal, Harold, Janie, Marie, her parents, maybe the whole world, and that this was not such a bad thing,

As she read and reread the note scrawled in Janie's riotously looping hand, she understood that she was holding one of those rare objects brought into being by a hope you didn't know you still had.

She asked Janie what it was like to have a mother, and Janie leaned over and gave Zorrie a kiss on the top of her head and then turned her around and gave her a quick kick in her seat and told her that having a mother was those two things, and that if sometimes it was more of one than the other, it all balanced out in the end.

As she began to doze, she wondered if when you rode in airplanes, love, even old impossible love, sent hearts tumbling end over end.

I am dreaming, I thought, and should go straight to my bed and hide under its pillow, for, like quills, dreams can mark you, dreams can stripe your back.

Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the "fragile film of the present" felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried. She wondered if Noah had

prepared for them. He would talk as they washed and dried and put the dishes away. He would talk and then not talk as they lay, later, for hours entire entwined. Zorrie slept in sweet, shallow bursts. Some nights, when she woke or couldn't sleep, the walls fell away and the coming day unfurled before her. Lying there listening to the crickets, she could feel the corn against her waist and wrists, the tangled beans against her ankles. The wet

He thought that there was plenty out there, and allowed that maybe some of it was even eternal, but he wasn't sure any of it needed a name and so many little houses built on its behalf in the countryside out of wood and stone.

Truth has many different drawers and shelves.

There are no poor men. Not even among the wretches

You can't ever know when the dead world will come to you. Only that it will.

But could she see things clear like you can? Could she see straight through you? See through your hair and skin to your blood and bones? Did she ever give your cheek a lick to see how you tasted and tell what you would become? Did she have a scar on her chest like a door? Did she ever leave you for long periods? Did a squirrel ever come and sit on her shoulder and whisper in her ear?

Janie said she thought you'd make it through. That you'd keep finding things worth finding.

Oh, it's a merry thing, this heart of yours," she said. "It's like a drink in a small glass on the deck of a storm-tossed ship or a shout in a fiery room.

Uno obedecía, así de simple, y si en lo más enconado del combate no obedecía, moría. A veces moría de todos modos.

Still, it was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.