Top 120 John D. MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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.”

— John D. MacDonald

53. “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?”

— John D. MacDonald

54. “All women are at war all the time, and when I’ve got hunger pains, it shows a little more.”

— John D. MacDonald

55. “What kind of people did he have aboard, Willy?” “Smart-ass kids.” “Tourists, college kids?” He stared through me for a moment. “I knew one of them.” “One of the kids?” “What the hell are we talking about? One of the kids. Yes. You know over the bridge on the right there, past where they’re building is a place called Charlie Char-Broil.”

— John D. MacDonald

56. “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

57. “And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious.”

— John D. MacDonald

58. “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

59. “She was back in three minutes just to tell me that she couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t get a little nutty from time to time, but she felt she was past the pill period, and then she headed back toward the beach, a lissome broad in her mirrored sunglasses, walking on good legs, and she was far younger than her years, yet old as the sea she approached.”

— John D. MacDonald

60. “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

61. “I could have listed maybe fifty possible reactions without coming close to the one I got. Her eyes dulled and her narrow nostrils flared wide and her mouth fell into sickness. She lost her posture and stood in an ugly way.”

— John D. MacDonald

62. “For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.”

— John D. MacDonald

63. “When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.”

— John D. MacDonald

64. “After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility.”

— John D. MacDonald

65. “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

66. “He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before.”

— John D. MacDonald

67. “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

68. “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.”

— John D. MacDonald

69. “My ward had arisen. She had slept so hard her eyes looked puffy, but she had acquainted herself with the equipment in my stainless steel galley, and she wore a pretty cotton dress, which hung just a little loosely on her, and she had taken two generous steaks out of the locker and set them out to thaw. She seemed a little more aware of the situation, shyly aware that she might be a nuisance.”

— John D. MacDonald

70. “The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.”

— John D. MacDonald

71. “Sly and reckless, compulsive and bold. The goat-god, with hoof and smile and hairy ears, satyr at the helm of the Play Pen. Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud, or Jesus. Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.”

— John D. MacDonald

72. “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.”

— John D. MacDonald

73. “For once her new placidity was impaired.”

— John D. MacDonald

74. “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

75. “A sulphur sun pierced the gloom, and the rain stopped and I drove to the hospital.”

— John D. MacDonald

76. “Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.”

— John D. MacDonald

77. “We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.”

— John D. MacDonald

78. “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

79. “Junior Allen grinned and grinned and grinned. But some instinct made him wary of me. I would look toward him and see those little blue eyes studying me over that wide smile. He was a big old tom watching benignly as the mice cavorted. He didn’t want another cat at the party. There wasn’t enough for two.”

— John D. MacDonald

80. “The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them.”

— John D. MacDonald

81. “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

82. “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

83. “These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids.”

— John D. MacDonald

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.”

— John D. MacDonald

87. “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

88. “She trudged along, dutiful as a naughty child.”

— John D. MacDonald

89. “He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.”

— John D. MacDonald

90. “The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures.”

— John D. MacDonald

91. “You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.”

— John D. MacDonald

92. “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.”

— John D. MacDonald

93. “At last there came the reward for patience, her tremendous inhalation broken into six separate fragments, her whole body listening to itself then, finding, being certain, and then taking with hunger. Later she lay curled languid against my chest, her heart and breathing slow. “Wasn’t too soon,” she said, a blurred drone. “No, it wasn’t.” “Sweet,” she said. “Ver’ sweet.” And she nestled down into the sleep of total exhaustion.”

— John D. MacDonald

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “In the morning I’m often anti-semantic.”

— John D. MacDonald

99. “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

100. “Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?” “It doesn’t matter.” “Which would you rather do?” The effort of decision brought her out of her torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. “I guess I have to be with you.”

— John D. MacDonald