Quotes from John D. MacDonald

I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymbals. Not that I want to say it isn't music.

Time is the random wind that blows down the long corridor, slamming all the doors.

That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happy-meter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope.

one man, under stress, react in Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in a noble way, a selfless way. But to me, organized religion, the formalities and routines, it's like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. I don't knock it for other people. Maybe they need routines, rules, examples, taboos, object lessons, sermonizing. I don't.

Sam, darling, when you suddenly look around you and see that—life itself is the basic magic, the real miracle, then we might have a chance. You are trying to impose your sense of order and fitness on the randomness of people and the illogic of fate. You want to refute the basic textures, the crazy mixture of life, and neaten it all up.

He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things. —GEORGE SAVILE, MARQUIS OF HALIFAX

More fun than a hungover, carbuncled cowboy might have while trying to stay aboard a longhorn, in a dusty rodeo, but it would be a close decision

When you cannot like yourself or any part of yourself in mind or body, then you cannot love anyone else at all.

answer?" I shrugged. "Answer shmanser. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. I know my patterns and limitations, needs and hang-ups. So I go on. Right? I endure. I enjoy what I can. There aren't any more forks in the road to take. Keep walking.

Because I know that everything we have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence.

I live free and simple, Kirby, and I look on myself in the mirror and say hello to a friend I like. The day I stop liking her, I change my ways.

And it was okay because it had to be. There wasn't any other choice. Sometimes it is a relief not to have a choice. I will have to get Meyer to explain this concept to me.

Disposable cubicles for dispensable people.

A lot of my motivation had been to show him that I had value, that I was valued by the world, and so I was worthy of his love and his respect. He had never shown me love or respect.

That old honorary Cuban had simplified the question all to hell when he'd said that a moral act is something you feel good after. Conversely, you feel bad after an immoral act. But what about the act that is neither moral nor immoral, Papa? How are you supposed to feel then?

God and your folks give you the face you're born with, but you earn the one you die with.

Hoover Hess, the owner, was working the desk. He was a loose, asthmatic, scurfy man with the habitual expression of someone having his leg removed without anesthetic. His smile was a special agony. He had gone as high as a seventh mortgage and been down as low as a second. He averaged out at about four.

The living are worth every final bit of love and energy you can toss into the kitty. The dead are worth tears. Trying to do more for the dead is self-love. It's pride gone bad. It's romantic nonsense.

He went down into the ornate maze of bars and shops and dining rooms in the bowels of the hotel and found a grill room that would serve him a steak sandwich and coffee.

You design the vulgar pots and sell them to the vulgar people. When you start believing them, you become fraudulent, Miss Nina. You make a plausible adjustment to the facts of life. I don't. And that isn't a virtue on my part. It's the disease of permanent adolescence. Honey, when you take your tongue out of your cheek, you become suspect.

First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he's out of town.

Don't get intrigued. It's not worth it. I'm a high level beach-bum. And I'm about as permanent as a black eye.

When anybody looks directly at me, right into my eyes, which isn't normal, and doesn't do any fidgeting, which again isn't normal, and drops their voice level about a half octave and gets real grammatical, I just lay back and wait for them to bring out the three walnut shells and the rubber pea.

Win-Tech tried a lot harder to keep you than they did to keep me. I'm a backstop-type guy, hot on administration and controls. But people who can design circuits and take the bugs out of them are rare birds.