Quotes from John D. MacDonald

Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave.

Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.

Gian Gravina? 'A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.' 

The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit.

Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.

He thought, as the locked truck slid and hit: Too much time staring at the pretty girl, Cherrik. Too much dreaming. Too old, Cherrik. Too damn old.

Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

The bathroom was humid with steam and soap. The elderly Palm Beach sybarite who had ordered the pleasure barge for his declining years had added many nice touches.

Junior Allen grinned and grinned and grinned. But some instinct made him wary of me. I would look toward him and see those little blue eyes studying me over that wide smile. He was a big old tom watching benignly as the mice cavorted. He didn't want another cat at the party. There wasn't enough for two.

These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids.

Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject from a structured society.

This is the queasy shadowland, and they don't even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn't much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren't watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow.

The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.

And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious.

Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.

Ninety-nine percent of the things that ninety-nine percent of the people do are entirely predictable, when you have a few lead facts. Drunks, maniacs and pregnant women are the customary exceptions. Everyone has the suspicion he is utterly unique. But we are a herd animal, and we all turn to face into the wind.

But it's going to be used for the health and welfare of the bank accounts of the businessmen of Palm County, and done with so many reasonable arguments it'll be years before the public realizes what a polite screwing it took, here and all up and down this coast. Maybe what I'm saying is this, people. Nobody is going to listen to sweet reason.

Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time.

If the law can't protect us, then I'm dedicated to a myth, and I better wake up.

O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.

You know what just seeing him did to me." "I know. Lois, he just isn't that ominous. Evil, but not ominous. Sly, but not prescient. Once he is off balance, he will stay off balance, and fall heavily. And the law will gather him in.

But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.