Quotes from Samantha Hunt

Unfortunate though interesting choice, since it could almost convince you that some cosmic truth of our existence slips in no matter how much Sagan and Druyan tried to control it. Waldheim's dead now. Lots of the people on this record are dead now. We sent ghost stories up into space.

El said that kids today never sit still long enough to see how the river changes. What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What's going to happen without chance? Good question.

All stories are ghost stories," I

NASA sent up two satellites in '77, and on board both they packed golden records in case the satellite should ever encounter someone who might want to listen.

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

Her voice is an empty bucket kicked down a stone cellar staircase.

The baby turns and stretches inside, and a house I thought had many rooms turns out to have just one, where birth and death duke it out to decide whose turn it is this time.

The sun comes up. Ruth fingers the trunk of a bare tree. There's a pattern, a larvae fringe some creature tracked back and forth, drunk on whatever it ate, making writing no one can read. I want to get out of here. I want life to win, for now. I want to be a mother. We keep walking, trees and trees and sometimes a small clearing. I take no breaks. Dead leaves, dead needles, dead logs, but green everywhere. I can see the sky and I can see Ruth. Every now and again, a bird.

We do not rest because now I know what we are running from, and it looks a lot like death.

step out of the forest and onto a road, stepping into Technicolor. Even Ruth laughs. What's a road doing in a place so lost? We kick the dirt of it for a moment, testing its material. "You know where this leads eventually?" I ask her. She raises her brow, and I'm about to say a McDonald's equipped with free Wi-Fi, but that seems mean. I look back into the forest. We both do, but the path we walked is already gone forever.

What makes a home? Take your hands in his. This plus this. What makes the unsaid audible? The distance between us.

How does she know herself without a mother? How does she know herself without sound? I guess she knows the shape of things that aren't there instead.

don't know. I'm just telling you what I can observe, an essential skill of scientists and con men alike.

I respect your intelligence too much to construct a narrative that might convince you of a reality far from the truth." Mr.

I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

The lion's share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.