Quotes from John D. MacDonald

settled for a blooming redhead from Waco, Takes-us, name of Molly Bea Archer, carefully cut her out of the pack and trundled her, tipsy and willing, back to the Busted Flush.

I talked with Junior Allen. He didn't have his mind on it. He was crouched in the brush, and he could taste lamb, and he was alerted for the first shy sound of the little hoofs coming along the trail. I gently and indirectly advanced the idea of my coming along, and he firmly closed the door. He got up and sprang nimbly onto the dock, snapped the weak dock light on, checked his lines, adjusted a fender and came aboard again, restless.

But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah. Sleep immediately followed decision.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But

Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.

Sister, I do what I do, and I do it better than most, and I take some satisfaction in that. I am like a very dependable dog. They throw a stick into a jungle and I can go in there and bring it back.

It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.

There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope....They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to take care. God knows they are experts at taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.

So! So? So I don't think you drove that one off. So it was her choice. So she isn't the kind who says it is for good and then come back all of a sudden. With her, gone is gone. So if I were you, I would be just as bad off as you look. Or worse. So if I were you and one like that was gone for good, I'd miss hell out of her and wonder if maybe I'd handled things a little differently some how, I could have kept her around permanently. That's enough about 'so.

A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat—you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable.

Cathy introduced us. Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative.

I leaned over and slapped his face sideways and backhanded it back to center position. Manners, I said.

I had that fractional part of consciousness left which gave me a remote and unimportant view of reality. The world was a television set at the other end of a dark auditorium, with blurred sound and a fringe area picture.

All women are at war all the time, and when I've got hunger pains, it shows a little more.

Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?" "It doesn't matter." "Which would you rather do?" The effort of decision brought her out of her torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. "I guess I have to be with you.

For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.

He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before.

My ward had arisen. She had slept so hard her eyes looked puffy, but she had acquainted herself with the equipment in my stainless steel galley, and she wore a pretty cotton dress, which hung just a little loosely on her, and she had taken two generous steaks out of the locker and set them out to thaw. She seemed a little more aware of the situation, shyly aware that she might be a nuisance.

Victims, he thought, were birds and animals and people who arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, usually in too big a hurry.

For once her new placidity was impaired.

In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.

After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility.

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?

Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.