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Gian Gravina? 'A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.'
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John D. MacDonald |
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The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.
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firearms
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Walk very lightly and carefully, Wade. Look behind every bush.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But
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John D. MacDonald |
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For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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"
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee's Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fishcatching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of cozines..
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mcgee
melancholy
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.
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John D. MacDonald |
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anxious little smile that came and went--a mendicant
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John D. MacDonald |
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are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all the people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare,
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John D. MacDonald |
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Ask for two, and they give you the third free.
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John D. MacDonald |
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If you look over in that direction, like two hundred yards, you will see some birds walking. Never drive the boat toward where the birds are walking. First rule of navigation.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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,
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John D. MacDonald |
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This is the queasy shadowland, and they don't even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn't much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren't watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow.
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John D. MacDonald |
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She went inside and watched him walk back toward sixteen,
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John D. MacDonald |
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The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.
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John D. MacDonald |
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And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious.
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John D. MacDonald |
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You know what just seeing him did to me." "I know. Lois, he just isn't that ominous. Evil, but not ominous. Sly, but not prescient. Once he is off balance, he will stay off balance, and fall heavily. And the law will gather him in."
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John D. MacDonald |
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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.
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John D. MacDonald |
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It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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 wai..
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John D. MacDonald |
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For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.
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John D. MacDonald |
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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 mote..
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John D. MacDonald |
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The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Once in a while they show up to ask some more questions, but you are amiable, slightly stupid, and very polite.
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John D. MacDonald |
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Nina came out--gloved, pursed, be-hatted, wearing a fall suit a little too tailored for her structure--came out with a frail and indefinite-looking man and paused to argue with him, saying, "Freddie, if you show him three, he'll bog, and you know it, dear. That little mind can make a choice of the best of two, if the choice is obvious. So make the presentation of just Tommy's and Mary Jane's. They're the best and the worst so far, and he'll..
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John D. MacDonald |
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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?"
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John D. MacDonald |
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You? Really now, Mr. McGee. You are spectacularly huge, and a tan that deep is almost vulgar, and you have a kind of leathery fading boyish charm, but this is not and never was a game for dilettantes, for jolly boys, for the favor-for-an-old-buddy routine. No gray-eyed wonder with a big white grin can solve anything or retrieve anything by blundering around in my life. Thanks for the gesture. But this isn't television. I don't need a big br..
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John D. MacDonald |
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the glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone's desire to be useful.
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John D. MacDonald |
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I heard his hasty footsteps on the dock. I kept my head down. I heard the thump and felt it as he leaped down into the cockpit. I heard his grunt of consternation. He would have to find out, and find out quickly.
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John D. MacDonald |
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He was back at me like a cat, and he swung a hard chunk of wood from one of the smashed chairs. I caught the first one on the shoulder and I cleverly caught the next one right over the left ear. It broke a big white bell in my head, and he side-stepped, grunting for breath, and let me go down. I landed on my side, and he punted me in the belly like Groza trying for one from the mid-field stripe.
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John D. MacDonald |