Daddy's Gone A-Hunting Quotes

“The world might split open like a cracked apple, death be expected, prepared for. Moons might ride the sky and love, doomed, struggle to grow in impossible places. Baby would still lisp the cute remark, refuse spinach, need unobtainable gaiters. Listening, Ruth felt drawn into a cult, a society, in which adult people were no longer required to stand alone, but where supported by their children. How can we move, think, breathe, they groaned, when impeded by these living crutches? But without them, life would be too dangerous; an emptiness in which, the most fearful thing of all, there would be no time, no landmarks.”
― Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

“His cold, already ageless eyes held Ruth's for a moment. She recognized them as the eyes of a man who felt nothing. Posturing for other people, for the countless mirrors, he would assume attitudes of outrage, love, friendship, even physical need. He would probably go through his entire life imagining that he was real; but not one person would owe him gratitude, remember his comfort. At the moment, still so young, he didn't even know what he was meant to be feeling. The attitude was uncertain, but the intention was clear: I shall never do anything for anyone, because I don't believe anyone except myself exists. There was shaking it, no changing it. It was useless to try.”
― Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

“The first stage of the nightmare is losing the ability to believe in insignificance. Consciousness is sharpened to a point in which nothing is trivial but every moment, every detail, has the same unbearable quality of dread. In this condition of despair there are no crises. The merciful censor of memory has broken down and everything is recalled with equal horror, the broken nail becomes a jagged pointer to the senselessness of living, the most commonplace remark releases, without warning, the grief or terror of a lifetime. But still the days pile up, one on top of the other, in an orderly fashion; the weeks are marked by a red Sunday and the months have names. It is necessary to eat and sleep. It is necessary to prepare for the future, even if this is only done by drawing in breaths so that it may, in a moment, be exhaled and breathed again. The moral judgement delivered on this state of unhappiness is as severe as that pronounced on the lunatics of Bedlam. Lost, it says with smug disgust, all sense of proportion. Which is exactly true.”
― Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

“The long, painful, frustrating summer was over: the summer of wet socks, of plimsolls fossilised by salt and sand; the summer of Wellington boots and Monopoly, bicycles left out in the rain and the steady, pungent smell of bubble gum; the summer of inadequacy. It had begun with strawberries pried out like jewels from under the wet leaves and covering of straw; it had ended with bitter quarrels over who should shred the runner beans, hard and brown as old leather. And now it was over. The children, the summer, gone.”
― Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting