Home > Author > Dave Appleby
1 " Sons love mothers, mothers love their sons? It’s sentimental nonsense uttered only by the fools who purchase greeting cards and, in another and much darker sense, by Freudians. "
― Dave Appleby , Motherdarling
2 " I make the morning fat. A lie in. And why shouldn’t I? I have been working half the night and now I sprawl in slightly sweat-stained sheets, delighting in the sordid luxury of wanton greasy nakedness.I had been tempted, when the maid came in to clean, to try my borrowed Gallic charm. If I had been a younger man. But, maybe, twice-divorced, now orphaned, battered by the storms of life, I have at last learned just enough self-knowledge to perceive what she would see in me. An old man. Lecherous. At best a source of cash. So I apologised. Said I was sleeping in. Sent her away. "
3 " Some people seem to have a map of life: they know where they are going and they plot their route. I have just floated in a chartless sea, my journey governed by the winds and currents. I’ve reacted. First I fled from Motherdarling. I would not have been a student were it not for Gilles. I have spent all my life since then at the Sorbonne, until I had to leave. I married when my girl got pregnant; she gave birth and raised my son; if she had not left me I’d still be with them both. I wedded for the second time as the result of being wooed, not wooing. Life’s been done to me and now I don’t know where to go. "
4 " Men play at life. They use important words like principles and duty, honour and beliefs. But women have to sort things out. Wrap up the sandwiches. Mend broken knees and broken hearts. Clean surfaces. "
5 " School is boring. University? You must be joking. Three more years of boredom? Then you get a boring job and live a boring life. Die when you’re bored enough. "
6 " My thoughts are stale, I baby-step from humdrum this to dreary that with no sense of direction, trudging and prosaic, dead-brained, ordinary, dull. I need to put a match to these dry sticks, I need to flame some fireworks in my mind. But I can’t even smell the fuel. "
7 " Sometimes, when I’m writing, there is nothing in my head except for sand dunes and sterility and if I try to drag a sentence from my mind and spread it on the paper it can seem as sullen as the sinking sun, exhausted, senile, spent. "
8 " ...there are times when reason, sense and rationality are houses made of paper in a hurricane of feeling. "
9 " We walk in circles. We repeat ourselves. And sometimes on the path we see another set of footprints but we never recognise them as our own. "
10 " She loves her garden. Dad joked that she spent more time on her knees out there than in the church. She answered that she had her doubts about a God who had created bindweed. "
11 " I know that my horizon is where it always has been: the far side of the street. "
