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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
0555c72	The bathroom was humid with steam and soap. The elderly Palm Beach sybarite who had ordered the pleasure barge for his declining years had added many nice touches.			John D. MacDonald
531b3be	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 g..			John D. MacDonald
d53d84f	Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.			John D. MacDonald
c3ad8fe	But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever..			John D. MacDonald
ecbf28e	By five minutes of four I was checked into the hotel. They had a lot of room. They had three conventions going and they still had a lot of room. Once inside the hotel, I was right back in Miami. Same scent to the chilled air, same skeptical servility, same glorious decor--as if a Brazilian architect had mated an air terminal with a manufacturer of cotton padding. Lighting, dramatic. At any moment the star of the show will step back from one..			John D. MacDonald
cc67f9d	But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah. Sleep immediately followed decision.			John D. MacDonald
7eb5e4b	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 p..			John D. MacDonald
73bdceb	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."			John D. MacDonald
78fec53	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.			John D. MacDonald
b9923d0	In explosive gasps Chook introduced us and we went inside. I could see that she was elderly by Chook's standards. Perhaps twenty-six or -seven. A brown-eyed blonde, with the helpless mournful eyes of a basset hound. She was a little weathered around the eyes. In the lounge lights I saw that the basic black had given her a lot of good use. Her hands looked a little rough. Under the slightly bouffant skirt of the black dress were those unmist..			John D. MacDonald
220e24b	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
df7f159	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
b47ec0a	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
f748078	People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter.			John D. MacDonald
ea90490	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
05f68e2	She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.			John D. MacDonald
3dbb4b6	In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl.			John D. MacDonald
c91be99	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 l..			John D. MacDonald
7c20d25	But it's going to be used for the health and welfare of the bank accounts of the businessmen of Palm County, and done with so many reasonable arguments it'll be years before the public realizes what a polite screwing it took, here and all up and down this coast. Maybe what I'm saying is this, people. Nobody is going to listen to sweet reason.			John D. MacDonald
32b65ab	A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat--you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable.			John D. MacDonald
059c581	Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It's short-term. It's a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It's a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remor..		meyer	John D. MacDonald
fc3bb58	All women are at war all the time, and when I've got hunger pains, it shows a little more.			John D. MacDonald
108b276	Siesta is sweet when the light is gold, and when the vivid, young face on the pillow looks into yours, beside her, inches away, and smiles the woman-smile older than time, her exhalations warm against your mouth, as with slow fingers she traces your brows, lips, and the shape of cheek and jaw. There is nothing more es-stock. It has all been unfastened, all turned loose, with a guile that was so sweetly planned it could not be denied, even h..		romance méxico	John D. MacDonald
5b45ac1	In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.			John D. MacDonald
a0c6068	Why, my boy, if all over this great country little bands of Communist sympathizers and Communist dupes could put a spoke in the wheels of free enterprise by blocking progress and production, Red Russia could bring this mighty nation to its knees without using one single little bomb. Lenin said that in order to achieve victory over the capitalist nations, it is first necessary to bankrupt them. Leaving that bay untouched is one of the device..			John D. MacDonald
e59faa6	You said if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just ... live on that until it starts to run out. Is that the way it is, really?			John D. MacDonald
4962101	The fact remains, we got the evidence right in front of us, the decay of the nashal moral fiber, mob rule in the streets, violence, punks killing decen' people. Am I right or am I right?			John D. MacDonald
4b8321a	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
3740424	The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for..			John D. MacDonald
16070b0	If there's no pain and no loss, it's only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.			John D. MacDonald
d2d00e3	I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?			John D. MacDonald
cd481ee	We want out. In the end, it's that simple. We want out, where the law is, where you prosper or you fail according to your own merits as a person. Is that so damned much? I don't want white friends. I don't want to socialize. You know how white people look to me? The way albinos look to you. I hope never to find myself in a white man's bed. I don't want to integrate. I just don't want to feel segregated. We're after our share of the power st..			John D. MacDonald
593a20b	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
4af0920	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.			John D. MacDonald
5bc00fd	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 a..			John D. MacDonald
145f816	The ones that swear off, most of them they go back onto it sooner or later, get pig drunk and locked up." "Something special you've got against drunks, Sheriff?" "Married to one for a long time. Too long. She finally drove into a tree one night."			John D. MacDonald
4bf2a37	The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob.			John D. MacDonald
e4b3681	It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.		world salvage-consultancy	John D. MacDonald
2e22af9	There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units o..		capitalism consumerism technology	John D. MacDonald
8881425	You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.			John D. MacDonald
0ef798e	It was to have been a quiet evening at home.			John D. MacDonald
b6446ed	I worry about everything all day long and half the night. I worry about things you never heard of.		life worry-quotes	John D. MacDonald
319b6be	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."			John D. MacDonald
9929df5	He's such a male little male.			John D. MacDonald

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