168 Quotes by John D. MacDonald

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.

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.

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

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.

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 unmistakable dancer’s legs, curved and trim and sinewy.

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.

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?

In the morning I’m often anti-semantic.

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 anyway?” “Throw them out, dear.