Samantha Hunt > Quotes

“If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“These woods are where silence has come to lick its wounds.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“She's not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Then there is the ocean, mean and beautiful.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“I don't think you'll believe what I found," he says. "A word, razbliuto. We don't have a word to match it but we should. We should develop it tonight because the word means, 'the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.' "Hate?" Jude says.
"No, not that feeling," my grandfather answers and looks and Jude with disappointment.
"Betrayal," my mother says without looking away from her book.
"No," my grandfather says. "It's the little house loved moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. the lover see the old love moving and it looks like it's alive again."
They are all wrong. There's a reason why we have no word for it. 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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark

“Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“you don't have to be dead to haunt. Parents, songs, exes.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“My love for him was -- Tyranny.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“So my mother was one of the few people on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Religions need women. Who else would do all the work?”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“We watched the water between us rushing back out to sea and I swear I saw the ocean fill up with words, like Jude was bleeding all the things he couldn't tell anyone because it might kill him.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“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.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“I glimpsed a huge beyond when I became a mother, the enormity of an abyss or the opposite of an abyss, the idea of complete fullness, the anti-death, tiny gods everywhere. But now all the world wants to hear of me is how I juggle children and career, how I manage to get the kids to eat their veggies, how I lost the weight. I will never lose this weight. When one encounters a mother doing too many things perfectly, smiling as if it is all so easy, so natural, we should feel a civic responsibility to slap her hard across the face, to scream the word Stop! Stop! So many times the woman begins to chant or whimper the word along with us. Once she has been broken, take her in your arms until the trembling and self-hatred leave her body. It is our duty. I used to think it was motherhood that loosens a woman’s grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, fear. Something we can’t yet see.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark

“Women will one day rule the world, and when they do, their brains will be so finely tuned from all the years of quiet that I anticipate they will be far superior rulers to men.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else

“Summer’s ending and the closest thing I’ve had to an adventure was a Google search of Baja California.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“We've been fogged in for five days. The fog makes me both love and hate the weather. I hate it because it brings me down, but I love it because if the foul state continues I won't have to do anything important with my life, and in many ways I am quite happy in that knowledge.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas