Quotes from Samantha Hunt

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

Motherhood," she says, "despite being immensely common, remains the greatest mystery, and all the language people use to describe it, kitschy words like 'comfort' and 'loving arms' and 'nursing,' is to convince women to stay put.

I get enraged at the tyranny of text." "What's that?" "You know. Left to right. Punctuation. Page 1, page 2, page 3.

Arthur takes a seat beside her. The colored lights bounce off his eyeglasses and Louisa loses all interest in time-travel technology. The future and the past disappear. All she feels is the tension between two bodies. How his head had been in her lap. How her hand had been wrapped inside his. The tension leaks down her throat. The belly. The muscle. And something forged. A weld. A softness. A vagueness that is rather quickly being sharpened into a point aimed directly at Louisa's heart.

I feel something foreign bloom between my husband and me, an intruder, a mold. I see my husband with eyes that don't know him, as if he quite suddenly became a man from Brazil, or grew a beard, or started speaking in a southern accent. As if after eleven years of marriage he somehow had all of his secrets returned to him, made secret again.

Microbes. Bacteria. Worms underground that mingle our parts with everything. It's generous." He locks his fingers in hers. "And infinite." Mr. Bell squares his face to hers. "If you can get over the dreaded finite.

Dr. Adrienne Keene writes, "The system in what is currently known as the US isn't 'broken.' It was designed by male white supremacist slaveowners on stolen Indigenous land to protect their interests. It's working as it was designed.

Don't forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.

I touch a stack of the bills. The money is soggy and limp, having given up any hope of being palmed into the hands of Mafioso bouncers at a discothèque. It's grown complacent, moldering in an abandoned house on a mountaintop.

Nothing stranger than pregnancy could happen to a body. Not drugs, not sex. An unknown that gets bigger every day. An unknown I feel stirring, growing, making me do things my body doesn't normally do. A program set to play. One day it will talk to me. It will die. How's that possible?

the universe saying, I give this man just to you. I give you him wondrously, imperfectly made.

It has a strange way of making sense," Ruth whispers. Mr. Bell nods. "The mis-arrangement of words suggests reincarnation. It suggests multiple, endless readings.

What do you think?" "No way. Dirt to dirt. One Life to Live." Ruth winces. "Why? What's wrong with that?" he asks. "Microbes. Bacteria. Worms underground that mingle our parts with everything. It's generous." He locks his fingers in hers. "And infinite." Mr. Bell squares his face to hers. "If you can get over the dreaded finite.

Zeke snickers through a thin, diseased beard. "I really need you to stop now," and from the hollow of his back, as if scratching an itch, Zeke produces the tool of a coward and a cheat.

The clerk says to me, "If you're pregnant, you shouldn't eat cold cuts." Now that my belly shows, I'm public property. Strangers speak to me all the time. They tell me how I should do everything.

This whole time we've been walking, I thought we were heading somewhere, but just now, seeing her scared face, I know that we're also running away.

I follow Nat up a large center stair. It feels familiar, like following Ruth only now I'm on my way back to El. Velocity equals gravity at last. I had to gain some weight and distance before I could fall back to her.

Like likes like." When

A contraction that stops the world again, this pale blue dot. What do you want to search for? My mom. I hold still. The record continues to spin. And Ruth. Where's Ruth? I look beyond the white ceiling wondering what did I hope for here at the end? Did I want the mystery solved? Or did I just want to know that the mystery has no end? And where, where, where is Ruth?

Ouch." Mr. Bell grabs his arm. Blood darkens his sleeve. "That's a bit sore, Mardellion. And not entirely fair." The tiny bombs that parents bury under their child's skin take years to explode.

She doesn't even know enough about mothers to fabricate a good one. Her idea of a mother is like a non-dead person's idea of heaven. It must be great. It must be huge. It must be better than what she's got now.

Blind Willie Johnson. 'Dark Was the Night.

The deepest lake in the Adirondacks is made by men and full of enough mystery to betray all humankind.

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