John D Macdonald Quotes

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If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.
John D. MacDonald
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.
John D. MacDonald
...there are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake.
John D. MacDonald (Free Fall in Crimson (Travis McGee #19))
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald (Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee #7))
Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.
John D. MacDonald (The Green Ripper (Travis McGee #18))
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that 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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.
John D. MacDonald (The Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee #21))
Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
John D. MacDonald (The Green Ripper (Travis McGee #18))
[Los Angeles] the world's biggest third-class city...
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold)
Every day, no matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.
John D. MacDonald (One Fearful Yellow Eye (Travis McGee, #8))
A fallow mind is a field of discontent.
John H. Cunningham (Red Right Return (Buck Reilly Adventure #1))
In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong demanding that all the life within her be matched. Her instinct would detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her - and then she would be gone for good.
John D. MacDonald (The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee #4))
I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt’s, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero’s grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
never sit in the first row at the ballet.
John D. MacDonald
Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.
John D. MacDonald (Dress Her in Indigo (Travis McGee #11))
It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.
John D. MacDonald
When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate.It is a visceral recognition. I told myself I was getting too fanciful and went to bed.
John D. MacDonald (The Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee #21))
It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend.
John D. MacDonald (A Purple Place for Dying (Travis McGee #3))
It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.
John D. MacDonald (The Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee #21))
By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus.
John D. MacDonald (The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee #4))
The president is selling the country down the river with the help of the Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are a marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense that attracts those people who are so dim-witted that the only way they can understand the world is to believe that it is all some kind of conspiracy.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caressess of affection. There is a tiny magnificance about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.
John D. MacDonald
it takes a special man to tell the difference between right and wrong, but any damn fool can tell the difference between good and evil.
John D. MacDonald
Sama seperti perkawinan, persahabatan tergantung pada menghindari hal-hal yang tidak termaafkan.
John D. MacDonald
All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
summertime.” “I remember it well.
John D. MacDonald (Cinnamon Skin (Travis McGee, #20))
In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing. It is a companion in the night. Each boat has its own manner and character.” Travis McGee, 1985
John D. MacDonald
Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?
John D. MacDonald
Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there will be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came...
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They’re disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their head. And you can’t reverse the process.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?
John D. MacDonald (One Fearful Yellow Eye (Travis McGee, #8))
...I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
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.
John D. MacDonald (Cry Hard, Cry Fast)
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.
John D. MacDonald (Where is Janice Gantry?)
She went inside and watched him walk back toward sixteen,
John D. MacDonald (One More Sunday (Murder Room Book 423))
Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.
John D. MacDonald (The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Travis McGee #16))
Ask for two, and they give you the third free.
John D. MacDonald (The Last One Left)
Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.
John D. MacDonald
Gian Gravina? ‘A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.’ 
John D. MacDonald (The Turquoise Lament (Travis McGee #15))
The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
every day, not matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.
John D. MacDonald
The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them.
John D. MacDonald (The Green Ripper (Travis McGee, #18))
That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.
John D. MacDonald (Bright Orange for the Shroud)
My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.
John D. MacDonald (A Purple Place for Dying (Travis McGee #3))
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee #1))
Newsmen have a very short attention span. It is a prerequisite in the business. That is why the news accounts of almost anything make sense to all ages up to the age of twelve. If one wishes to enjoy newspapers, it is wise to halt all intellectual development right at that age. The schools are doing their level best to achieve this goal.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
He’d had a full measure of good bourbon and a fine dinner and probably some excellent brandy. It had dulled his mind slightly, and he was aware of that dullness and was consequently more careful and more suspicious than he would have been sober. He refused a drink. He lowered himself into a comfortable chair and took his time lighting his pipe.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others
John D. MacDonald (Nightmare in Pink (Travis McGee, #2))
Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time.
John D. MacDonald (One More Sunday (Murder Room Book 423))
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.
John D. MacDonald (One More Sunday (Murder Room Book 423))
It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.
John D. MacDonald (One More Sunday (Murder Room Book 423))
Walk very lightly and carefully, Wade. Look behind every bush.
John D. MacDonald (Barrier Island (Murder Room Book 69))
Keep your head down, fella. Do your job. Sell the product, write the contracts, negotiate the loans, attend the closings, bank your share and fatten the Keogh accordingly.
John D. MacDonald (Barrier Island (Murder Room Book 69))
In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do." --Meyer's Law
John D. MacDonald
anxious little smile that came and went—a mendicant
John D. MacDonald (Bright Orange for the Shroud)
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.
John D. MacDonald (The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee #4))
For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift.
John D. MacDonald (Bright Orange for the Shroud)
For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.
John D. MacDonald (The Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee, #21))
The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
I don't like it anymore around here, Meyer. I want to go home. Every time I get blown up by a bomb I get that same feeling. I want to go home.
John D. MacDonald (The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Travis McGee #16))
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.
John D. MacDonald (One More Sunday (Murder Room Book 423))
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,
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
Chook’s phone went to nine rings before she answered in the gritty rancor of interrupted sleep. But her voice changed when she recognized mine. “Trav! I phoned you last night. Who is that Mrs. Atkinson?
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.
John D. MacDonald (A Purple Place for Dying (Travis McGee #3))
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism—all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.
John D. MacDonald (A Deadly Shade of Gold (Travis McGee #5))
...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.
John D. MacDonald (Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee #7))
I guess Chook is about twenty-three or -four. Her face is a little older than that. It has that stern look you see in old pictures of the plains Indians. At her best, it is a forceful and striking face, redolent of strength and dignity. At worst it sometimes would seem to be the face of a Dartmouth boy dressed for the farcical chorus line. But that body, seen more intimately than ever before, was incomparably, mercilessly female, deep and glossy, rounded—under the tidy little fatty layer of girl pneumatics—with useful muscle.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
And you can sit out here in the hour before dawn, boy, and think virtuous thoughts and tell yourself how noble you are and all that shit, and you are going to lay back and hang on to the money, because that is the way the world keeps score. Not your way. Not lately.
John D. MacDonald (Barrier Island (Murder Room Book 69))
throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.
John D. MacDonald (Nightmare in Pink (Travis McGee, #2))
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything)
The biggest and most important reason in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for We. In the biggest sense of the word, it's cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside.
John D. MacDonald (The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Travis McGee #16))
The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a women of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee, #1))
cramp began to knot my right calf and so with thumb and forefinger I pinched my nose shut with considerable force and held the pressure until the cramp faded away. A Chinese solution. Acupressure, just as steady pressure at the right point on the inside of the wrist, three finger widths from the heel of the hand, will inhibit nausea.
John D. MacDonald (The Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee, #21))
How old is she now?” “Oh, she’s twenty now.” She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it’s done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, “See you aroun’, huh?” “Sure, Marianne. Sure.” Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Travis McGee #16))
I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuric-acid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?
John D. MacDonald (The Turquoise Lament (Travis McGee #15))
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.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
there is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. his specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter.
John D. MacDonald
You’re so bright, Trav, and so intuitive about people. And you have … the gift of tenderness. And sympathy. You could be almost anything.” “Of course!” I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace back and forth through the lounge. “Why didn’t I think of that! Here I am, wasting the golden years on this lousy barge, getting all mixed up with lame-duck women when I could be out there seeking and striving. Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life. Maybe it isn’t too late yet! Find the little woman, and go for the whole bit. Kiwanis, P.T.A., fund drives, cookouts, a clean desk, and vote the straight ticket, yessiree bob. Then when I become a senior citizen, I can look back upon …” I stopped when I heard the small sound she was making. She sat with her head bowed. I went over and put my fingertips under her chin. I tilted her head up and looked down into her streaming eyes. “Please, don’t,” she whispered. “You’re beginning to bring out the worst in me, woman.” “It was none of my business.” “I will not dispute you.” “But … who did this to you?” “I’ll never know you well enough to try to tell you, Lois.” She tried to smile. “I guess it can’t be any plainer than that.” “And I’m not a tragic figure, no matter how hard you try to make me into one. I’m delighted with myself, woman.” “And you wouldn’t say it that way if you were.” “Spare me the cute insights.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
I drove back into town, full of the look of her, full of the impact of her. It was an impact that made the day, the trees, the city, all look more vivid. Her face was special and clear in my mind—the wide mouth, the one crooked tooth, the gray slant of her eyes. Her figure was good, shoulders just a bit too wide, hips just a shade too narrow to be classic. Her legs were long, with clean lines. Her flat back and the inswept lines of her waist were lovely. Her breasts were high and wide spaced, with a flavor of impertinence, almost arrogance. It was the coloring of her though that pleased me most. Dark red of the hair, gray of the eyes, golden skin tones.
John D. MacDonald (A Bullet for Cinderella)
Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I’ve been of some help. It’s coming upon closing time, and I don’t stay around here one minute more than I need to.” We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good
John D. MacDonald (Cinnamon Skin (Travis McGee, #20))
Brave (2012) C-94m. 1⁄2 D: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman. Voices of Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd, Julie Walters, Craig Ferguson, John Ratzenberger. In ancient times, a Scottish princess named Merida resists her mother’s constant training to become a future queen, preferring a boisterous existence roaming the forest with her trusty bow and arrow. When it comes time for her to choose a suitor, she runs away and stumbles onto a witch who agrees to change her fate through a magical dark spell. Typically handsome Pixar animated feature has robust characters but a formulaic feel—until the story takes a very strange turn. A final burst of emotion almost redeems it. Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature. 3-D Digital Widescreen. [PG] Braveheart (1995) C-177m. 1⁄2 D: Mel Gibson. Mel
Leonard Maltin (Leonard Maltin's 2015 Movie Guide (Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide))
All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.' Now I knew this for what it was; a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
From A Deadly Shade of Gold, a Travis McGee title: “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” From the stand-alone thriller Where Is Janice Gantry?: “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.” These two angles show up everywhere in his novels: the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden, which included people, animals, and what we now call the environment—which was in itself a very early and very prescient concern: Janice Gantry, for instance, predated Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by a whole year. But the good knight’s armor was always tarnished and rusted. The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion. Where did it come from? Not, presumably, the leafy block where he was raised in quiet and comfort. The war must have changed him, like it changed a generation and the world.
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade. The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.
John D. MacDonald (Cinnamon Skin (Travis McGee, #20))