Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Hunter:
“Back on the job, this kind of heat was when we knew things were gonna get messy. People lose their minds, do the type of crazy stuff where you figure they must’ve been high on half a dozen things at once, till the tests come back and nope, stone-cold sober. Just hot. Whenever it stays hot for too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.”
“being boring is among Cal’s main goals. For most of his life, one or more elements always insisted on being interesting, to the point where dullness took on an unattainable end-of-the-rainbow glow. Ever since he finally got his hands on it, he’s savored every second.”
“When her husband died, five years back, she learned the skill of taking every scrap of happiness where she could find it. A fresh bed or a perfectly buttered piece of toast could lighten the weight enough to let her catch a breath or two.”
“Rip, who is a creature of sense, has taken one sniff of Johnny and decided that nibbling his own ass for fleas is a better use of his time.”
“…them telly lads give me the sick all the same. Going on about climate change as if it’s news, big shocked faces on them. They coulda asked any farmer, any time these last twenty year: the summers aren’t the same as what they were. They turned tricky on us, and they’ve only got trickier. And meanwhile all them fools are lying on the beaches, burning the pasty arses off themselves, like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to them.”
“It seems to Trey that the thing at her feet shouldn’t be considered as a person any more. As a person, as Rushborough, it’s incomprehensible, wrong in ways that her mind can barely take in without ripping. If she looks at it as just another thing on the mountain, it becomes simple. After a while the mountain will absorb it, as it does fallen leaves and eggshells and rabbits’ bones, and transmute it into other things. Seen in this way, it makes clear and uncomplicated sense.”
“El sol y el calor aumentan la sensación de peligro de la montaña, como si se envalentonara y negara a mantener ocultos sus riesgos, prefieriendo alardear de ellos de un modo provocador.”
“if I’ve to listen to that gobshite, I’d want to be well marinated.”
“Trey is good at noticing things outside herself but uninterested in noticing things inside, so it takes her a while to recognize that this is the way she felt most of the time, up until a couple of years ago and Cal and Lena.”
“Trey doesn’t disbelieve her, exactly, but she finds the image inaccessible.”
“Cal has professional experience of shitbirds like this, whose lies take up so much space that people believe them just because disbelieving all of that would be too much work. He has no certainty that, when he says his own piece, the guys will be swayed. He’s sharply aware that he’s a stranger, no less than Rushborough, and one who’s given them trouble before”
“Cal’s place is where Trey is taking the chair, later on. Cal and Trey mend furniture for people, or make it, and they buy old wrecked furniture and fix it up to sell at the Saturday market in Kilcarrow town. One time they picked up a side table that to Trey looked useless, too little and spindly to hold anything worthwhile, but when Cal went on the internet it turned out to be almost two hundred years old. When they got through with it, they sold it for a hundred and eighty quid. The chair Trey is carrying has two stretchers and one leg in splinters, like someone gave it the kind of kicking that takes time and dedication, but once she and Cal get done with it, no one will be able to tell it was ever broken”
“She’s going home first, for lunch, because she wants to eat dinner at Cal’s—Trey is growing fast enough, this summer, that she marks out her days mainly in terms of food—and her pride shies from turning up on his doorstep looking for two meals in the one day. She watches her boundaries extra hard because, if she had her wish, she’d live there. Cal’s place has peace. As far up the mountain as Trey’s house is, and as far from any other, it ought to be peaceful enough, but it crowds her. Her oldest brother and sister are gone, but Liam and Alanna are six and five and are mostly yelling for one reason or another, and Maeve is eleven and is mostly complaining and slamming the door of the room she shares with Trey.”
“She'll bake bread and make jam, because she likes those made her way, but she says she cooked a good meal from scratch every night of her marriage, and now if she wants to live mainly off toasted sandwiches and ready meals, she has the right.”
“Trey has a bone-deep mistrust of marriage or anything resembling it. She knows that Lena sometimes stays the night at Cal's place, but Lena also has a place of her own, which she can go back to whenever she wants, and where no one else has any say or any right of entry. To Trey, this seems like the only possible arrangement with any sense to it.”
“Trey has been thinking about Brendan. She doesn’t think about him as much, these days. When she first learned what had happened to him—by accident, Cal said it happened, things just went bad that day, with the implication that that should make some kind of difference—she never stopped. She spent hours going back and redoing things in her mind so that she kept him from leaving the house that afternoon, warned him what to look out for, went along with him and shouted the right words at the right moment. She saved him a million times over, not because she believed it would change anything, just for respite from a world where he was dead.”
“Trey can feel him wanting her to put all her hope on him. She can’t remember when she first knew that he’s too puny to take that weight.”
“She could settle his mind, temporarily at least, by bringing him to bed, but she decided right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to make Cal’s moods her responsibility—not that he has many, but Sean, her husband, was a moody man, and she made the mistake of believing that was her problem to fix. The fact that Cal never expects her to do that is one of the many things she values in him. She has no intention of wrecking it.”
“He liked to promise them things; he loved to see their faces light up when he said he’d bring them to the circus in Galway, or buy them a toy car that climbed up walls. He didn’t seem to feel any need to follow through on his promises; in fact, he always seemed a little bit surprised and aggrieved when they asked.”
“Mrs. Duggan is settled deep into her armchair, overflowing onto the arms. She’s wearing a purple dress and battered fleece slippers; her hair, dyed a shiny black, is pulled back in a tight bun. She has the air of something geological, like the house was built around her because no one was willing to move her.”
“There’s nothing Lena can do about that; it’s a demand of the circumstances and the place, neither of which has any truck with mercy. All she can do is give Trey these few minutes to get her bearings amid her new landscape.”
“It hits her full force that her mother is a mystery to her. She could have anything folded away inside her silence.”
“hits her full force that her mother is a mystery to her. She could have anything folded away inside her silence.”
“All the things that disappoint me worst, I knew them all along.”
“Cal is peeling carrots like they threatened his family.”
“Not to say grace, or anything else; just to sit still for a minute, with his hands wrapped around theirs, and his head down.”
“Ardnakelty is full of begrudgers who take optimism personally;”
“Cal has professional experience of shitbirds like this, whose lies take up so much space that people believe them just because disbelieving all of that would be too much work.”
“Tis a mad aul’ world, when you think about it. Whatever you do, it all comes to the same in the end.”
“You couldn’t kill that aul’ divil with a Sherman tank.”
