Laird Hunt > Quotes

“Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, ‘Right this way.’

Well, here I come.”
― Laird Hunt, Kind One

“For there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“A tale is a funny thing, and even when it’s your own and you have a quill in your hand you must be careful where you touch it.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“There was magic in wanting to see a thing that has been marvelously described.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the “fragile film of the present” felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“You could get whiplash trying to watch time go by.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run.
I said all this to my dead mother, spoke it down through the dirt: there was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark.”
― Laird Hunt

“There are no poor men. Not even among the wretches.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“She had often thought of Anne Frank, who had stuffed her short life with so much wonder, while here she was, having been granted many more years, just going through the motions like she was a ten-penny wind-up doll.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“She asked Janie what it was like to have a mother, and Janie leaned over and gave Zorrie a kiss on the top of her head and then turned her around and gave her a quick kick in her seat and told her that having a mother was those two things, and that if sometimes it was more of one than the other, it all balanced out in the end.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“It occurred to her then that it was silence and not grief that connected them, that would keep them forever connected, the living and the dead—her, Noah, Opal, Harold, Janie, Marie, her parents, maybe the whole world, and that this was not such a bad thing,”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“You can't ever know when the dead world will come to you. Only that it will.”
― Laird Hunt

“For my own part I kept very quiet, as quiet as I have ever been, for there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“Life, Virgil had said, was a good deal about discouragement and fear, and the soul, which was the true heart of humankind whether you looked at it Christian or otherwise, needed a good deal of comforting some way or other if it was expected to soldier on.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“But could she see things clear like you can? Could she see straight through you? See through your hair and skin to your blood and bones? Did she ever give your cheek a lick to see how you tasted and tell what you would become? Did she have a scar on her chest like a door? Did she ever leave you for long periods? Did a squirrel ever come and sit on her shoulder and whisper in her ear?”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“Still, it was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“But a quill on paper was different from a stick on the bottom of a stream or a fingertip on my forearm. Its scratch was like the dry sparking of a flint and a page with fresh marks on it like a blazing porcupine. A tale written down must be like that, I thought. It must be like the block of wood of the body sprouting tiny tongues of fire and who knows where the next one will rise and burn.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“As she read and reread the note scrawled in Janie’s riotously looping hand, she understood that she was holding one of those rare objects brought into being by a hope you didn’t know you still had.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“As she began to doze, she wondered if when you rode in airplanes, love, even old impossible love, sent hearts tumbling end over end.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“I’d like to be buried in a dirt mound,” Opal said. Zorrie bit her lower lip again. “They bury all kinds of things in there. That’s where you can find pottery and oyster shells. Child toys too, nice ones with jeweled beads. There are also quite a number of sundry charred articles, each wearing its own black coat. It would be warm and quiet in a dirt mound. You could lie there a long time. The snow could fall and cover the whole wide world and there you would lie.” “I like that,” said Zorrie. “ ‘Out of this sun, into this shadow,’ ” said Opal. “That’s pretty. Is that something you thought up?” “Well, Zorrie Underwood, that’s more or less by an author. You will not find it in the Bible. It’s not in any devotional. I used to like to say it the other way around, ‘Out of this shadow, into this sun,’ but that is not the way the author wrote it down. It’s harder the way she wrote it, but prettier and more true. Sometimes I get under my blanket and pretend that’s where I already am. Under the ground, I mean. I told Phoebe Nelson what I do sometimes, and now she does it all the time. Maybe now on Friday afternoons we can do it with your music.” “Wouldn’t that be too noisy?” “Oh, no, we would play it soft.” Zorrie looked over at the bed with the gray blanket and imagined what it would be like to have warm dirt piled on top of her. No coffin, just dirt. Warm and soft. The King crooning quietly while she melted away. “I had a friend they put into a coffin not too long ago. But it was a nice one, I’m told. All fresh and white. I’ve got another friend who might be going there soon,” Zorrie said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” “They were ghost girls. Over in Ottawa, Illinois. I guess I was one for a while too.” “Ghost girls, Zorrie Underwood?” “Because after work we would glow in dark places like movie theaters.” “Or like in my cave!” “Yes, just like that.” “Why, that’s a beautiful thing.” “Yes, it was. While it lasted. For a short while. A long time ago.” “Don’t you glow anymore?” “Not in many a year.” “Maybe I’m a ghost girl, then, too.” “Maybe you are.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Oh, it's a merry thing, this heart of yours," she said. "It's like a drink in a small glass on the deck of a storm-tossed ship or a shout in a fiery room.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips at the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“Ve. Ve, y a ver qué hay en ti.”
― Laird Hunt, Neverhome

“Hard to say,” Hank said. “I’ve never known a son who admired his father more, that’s the truth. But the truth there gets shipwrecked on the shores of their old family complaints. I know that remains the case. That Opal he lost is still more or less the blood beating through his veins.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“The crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for came to seem complicit in the agonized unfolding of her grief, so that soon the farm and the surrounding fields and the endless ark of change that enclosed them were the only timepiece whose hour strokes she could abide.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips and the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“El Señor nos había dado ojos para ver y pies para llevarnos a sitios donde pudiera verse todo, dijo. Era cosa nuestra salir y ver, salir y contemplar. Ese era nuestro trabajo. Debíamos atarnos bien los cordones de los zapatos y ponernos a ello. Lo peor que podía pasarnos era que fracasáramos. Y el fracaso solo significaba que habíamos tenido agallas suficientes para intentarlo.”
― Laird Hunt, Kind One

“Don't be weak, my boy', I whispered. I know he heard me. It was something I had told him many times. But what did I mean? For I did not want him to be strong either. Not like his father, who could fling his cousin through the air. Not like my mother, who could chase the husband, who so loved her, with a switch. I meant some other thing. Something like Captain Jane in her wolf cloak. Something like Eliza when the metal was in her voice and she had set her jaw.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“...like quills, dreams can mark you, dreams can stripe your back.”
― Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“On the bus ride down to the American Cemetery at Margraten she read the copy of Anne’s diary that she had purchased in the gift shop, and even as she followed along with the group on their tours of the fields of white crosses, she found herself thinking not of Harold, who had left nothing behind to be buried except in a cigar box that had stopped glowing years ago, but of the young girl, soon to die in unspeakable circumstances, who had written, “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie