Quotes from Samantha Hunt

When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it.

Having Jude is like having a dictionary the size of a man beside me. I open him up and ask him all sorts of questions.

Motherhood makes you a dealer in death. No one tells you this beforehand. You will become obsessed with all the ways a person can go because while it might be easy to deal with the fact that you will one day die, it's not at all easy—totally unacceptable—to deal with the fact that one day your child will die. Do

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.

Something in knowing is not quite as wonderful as not knowing. The

We were tired of living in a house.

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

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door. Anything solid in my neck snaps, and I'm screaming, looking into this hideous face, like some dark mold, a toxic messy thing. There

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door.

We didn't find him for three days because we didn't realize he was missing. That's the saddest part of this story. He'd hanged himself from a tree, one of several that grew in a small sliver of land between my parents' house and the neighbors', out by a swing set untouched for years. He timbered over like a sapling when my father cut him down, his body gone stiff.

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

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?

Some nights I want Jude so badly I imagine I am giving birth to him.

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

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

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

After only a week on the road, I am changed. It's hard for me to stay too long at a diner or coffee shop. I hear so much now. The air conditioners, dishwashers, coffee machines, and restroom hand dryers rage like an angry electric army.

Two teenage boys have tattoos on their necks, instantly halving the alienation they'd hoped to achieve.

things get made from belief and memory.

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

So if you want to convince me that there's something bigger going on here, some sort of grand plan or map or order in the universe, you're going to have to first explain why God makes bad moms." Ruth shrugs. "I don't know why." "Well, I do and it's because he doesn't exist.

There are no good guys or bad guys. Not really

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?

What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What's going to happen without chance?