Quotes from Samantha Hunt

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

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

If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.

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.

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

I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.

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.

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.

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

I . . . cannot fall asleep because there is a foreign feeling in my veins, it is the feeling of finally getting what I wanted, and the feeling is colder than I ever thought it would be.

Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.

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.

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.

Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.

There are two rooms used as libraries, for which my mother and grandfather keep two separate and opposing systems of organization in their heads—hers by subject, his by the way he feels about the author: Animosity, Betrayed, Curious, Delighted, etc.

My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.

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

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.

My love for him was -- Tyranny.

you don't have to be dead to haunt. Parents, songs, exes.

Summer's ending and the closest thing I've had to an adventure was a Google search of Baja California.

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

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.