Mac's Big Break Quotes

So, the MacGregors." "Yeah." Jane nodded with a long sigh. "The MacGregors." "I don't get what the big deal is with them," Charlotte said. "If you saw under their kilts, you would get what the big deal---" Annabelle tried to break in.

If that was a real question, there wasn’t time for me to answer because a very smartly dressed woman flared over and began talking to him, standing close with her fists on the hips of her slim-cut skirt, blocking him from view. This was Lillian Hellman, I would soon learn. She and Ernest and the others in the room made up the newly formed Contemporary Historians, a corporation bent on funding a documentary film that would help Spain acquire ambulances and other kinds of support. The filmmaker was Dutch, apparently, and already over in Spain with his Norwegian cameraman. Other members of the Historians were John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, and Evan Shipman, all writers big enough to cast shadows. The room seemed full of them as I sat in my blue chair, wondering how I might break in.

I came back from this tour feeling really cleansed,” he offers. “All the things that had been happening between me and Stevie and between John and Chris mellowed into the situations they are now. And it was important that I met a lot of beautiful women who I like a lot because, y’know, with the exception of one intervening summer, for the past ten years I’ve been tied up with just two ladies. Now here I am at 26, re-realizing capabilities about myself and being a little more aggressive socially and having a good time. “And for Stevie, someone like Don Henley is good for her. It’s strange; it’s one thing to accept not being with someone and it’s another to see them with someone else, especially someone like Don, right? A big star in another group. I could see it coming and I really thought it was gonna bum me out, but it was really a good thing just to see her sitting with him. It actually made me happy. I thought there was something to fear but there wasn’t. So the whole break-up has forced me to redefine my whole individuality—musically as well. I’m no longer thinking of Stevie and me as a duo. That thought used to freak me out but now it’s made me come back stronger, to be Lindsay Buckingham.

Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway. The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.

The big Ford van had been travelling non-stop since the last bathroom break and Travis had no idea how long ago that had been. He knew only that they had finally turned off that boring four-lane highway and that, far in the distance over the trees, the high green bridge over the St. Lawrence River was now visible. Beyond lay New York State and the road to Lake Placid. Finally.

Mr. MacDonald smiled. “They wouldn’t see and they wouldn’t listen,” he declared. “They never listen to people who try to tell them unpalatable truths. Lord Roberts warned them before the last war and they said he was in his dotage. Winston Churchill, Roger Keyes, Neville Henderson and half a dozen others warned them that Germany was on the warpath again, and all they did was to disarm faster and break up our battleships for scrap. . . . I don’t know whether you have noticed,” continued Mr. MacDonald, “it is rather an extraordinary thing: Churchill has never once said, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘If you had only listened to me.’ He is a big man, there is no doubt of that.

When, in a woman, full maturity is combined with character and with pride, it creates a special beauty unattainable by the very young. Her strong chin was high, and there was a look around her mouth of a person who has tasted something slightly spoiled. It’s pride, he thought. That damn rare wonderful thing. A proud man will keep getting up. Break both his legs and he’ll still give it a try. A proud woman won’t whine. She won’t give you the stifled sob and sheep-dog routine. She’ll square her pretty shoulders and stick those knockers out like a bureau drawer and suck in her tummy, and put a little swing in her hips, and spit right square in your eye.