Samantha Hunt
Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory.
Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
“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.”
“When a country goes to war, men can no longer operate free and open laboratories. The Government would like to know what you are doing. Businesses became corporations, the individual thinker became unpatriotic.”
“A man who has to forge his own tools, his own language, is a man who is going somewhere.”
“a dream to one day design terrifically odd-shaped swimming pools for a California clientele.”
“I am not from Venus. . . . I am from a small town on the Serbo-Croation border.”
“People can make beautiful mistakes, dear, and each one is an arrow, a brilliant arrow, pointing out the right way to there.”
“No. I'm not from outer space or the future. And this is not magic, just science, pure engineering. Magic, religion, the occult --all of it-- they are all excuses to not believe that wonders are possible here on Earth. I don't want to be magic. I want people to understand that things they never even dreamed of are possible. I want to be believed, Louisa.”
“It seems the loneliest place in the world for something so lovely.”
“Love destroys. Thought creates.”
“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'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.”
“Catching my breath. I watch them go. I watch them disregard gravity, the ground, and the distance between us. And though an old feeling, one of the wings, haunts my shoulder blades, I stay pinned to the window. I’ve learned that I cannot go with them”
“I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.”
“My love for him was -- Tyranny.”
“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.”