Quotes from John D. MacDonald

Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought.

What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn't be experimental, I don't think.

It sounded sort of strange, but I guess I believed you. You said if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just Ã¢â'¬Â¦ live on that until it starts to run out. Is that the way it is, really?

Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is ninety-nine percent aware and convinced of his own mortality. But then comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel. When a man becomes one hundred percent certain of his inevitable death, he gets The Look.

The world is the same world. You make it or you don't make it, honey. Nobody picks you up and brushes you off and gives you another run at it.

Children lack empathy about how the adults around them feel. Children have a tendency toward self-involvement which makes them give too much weight to trivia, too little weight to significant things. If the house burns down, the charred sister and the charred kitten are equally mourned.

These are our realities, and, like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we--as a species rather than as an individual--are uninformed or careless, or indifferent to the Facts (emphasis mine), then survival as a species is in serious doubt. ~~John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival. c. 1987

The real guilt is in being a human being. That is the horrible reality which bugs us all. Wolves, as a class, are cleaner, more industrious, far less savage, and kinder to each other and their young.

Bed is the simplest thing two people can do. If it goes with a lot of other things, it can be important, and if it goes with nothing else, it isn't worth the time it takes.

When the diffused brightness of direct sunlight no longer made a blue green glow through the closed draperies in front of the sliding glass that opened onto the beach-front bedroom terrace, Mr. Aldo Bellinger got up from the broad bed and padded naked across the thick tufted pile of the aqua rug and parted the draperies a few inches and looked out.

A stewardess took a special and personal interest in me. She was a little bigger than they usually are, and a little older than the norm. She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not. She had a big white smile and she was mildly bovine

I worry about everything all day long and half the night. I worry about things you never heard of.

Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead.

She asked me what Meyer had meant about her having a broken wing. I said he was one of the last of the great romantics. I said there used to be two. But now there was just the one left. The hairy one.

all the time she was acting like an actress on a Mike Wallace interview, the tears kept running right down her face. I couldn't even tell if she knew she was crying, Sam. And she kept the act going right up until the time when I left the house. Something is cracking up, Sam. Something is going all to hell, and fast. They seem to be

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They're disaster-prone.

On the most beautiful day any April could be asked to come up with

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.