Quotes from John D. MacDonald

I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping.

His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.

In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do. --Meyer's Law

sighed. "Bring her around sometime." She padded lithely over to me and took my wrist and looked at my watch. Her breathing had slowed. Her leotard was sweat-dark and fitted her almost as closely as her healthy hide. She beamed down at me. "I knew you'd be nice about it, Trav. She'll be here in twenty minutes." I stared up at her. "You are a con artist, McCall.

I have no stomach for surprises. I have endured too many of them. They upset me. The elimination of all removable risk is the most plausible way of staying alive.

her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some grey ash where the fires had been.

Once in a while they show up to ask some more questions, but you are amiable, slightly stupid, and very polite.

The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures.

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance, and Callowell was one of these.

The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the "one born every minute". The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him.

But when they don't wear helmets, they abuse the taxpayers, taking a couple of weeks to die in intensive care, their primitive brains jellied by hard impact with the concrete highway. Somebody has to pick them up when they go down and deliver them to Emergency, regrettably.

A sulphur sun pierced the gloom, and the rain stopped and I drove to the hospital.

He stared at me. "Strange you should do all this for her." "Pity, I guess." "One of the worst traps of all, McGee.

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance

I don't often do this much talking for so little reason, McGee. You have a nice touch. You're an eager listener. You smile in the right places. It puts people on. And, of course, you haven't leveled with me.

The rain had washed the sunset time to a lambent beauty.

Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.

How terribly dear!" she said. "How ineffably buddy-buddy! I shouldn't have gone running to him with my little heartache, Mr. McGee. It was selfish of me. It upset him, and it didn't do me any particular good. How can he check up on anything anyway? Why don't you just invent some soothing little story for him and go down and tell it to him and then go back to your beach-bum career, whatever it is?

He chuckled and pulled himself to his feet. "End of session, McGee. Good night and good luck." At the door he turned and said, "I'll have you checked out, of course. Just for the hell of it. I'm a careful and inquisitive man.

Saturday night. Buddy Dow, hired skipper of a big lunker owned by an insurance company in Atlanta, had enlisted two recruits and was despairingly in need of more.

All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?" "Throw them out, dear.

You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.

Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.

What kind of people did he have aboard, Willy?" "Smart-ass kids." "Tourists, college kids?" He stared through me for a moment. "I knew one of them." "One of the kids?" "What the hell are we talking about? One of the kids. Yes. You know over the bridge on the right there, past where they're building is a place called Charlie Char-Broil.