The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee #1)

by John D. MacDonald

The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion.

Instead of retiring at sixty, I’m taking it in chunks as I go along.”

The elimination of all removable risk is the most plausible way of staying alive.

And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

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. I love you can be said only two ways.

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.

I treated myself to a tepid tub and a chilly bottle of Dos Equis, that black Mexican beer beyond compare,

The marble was a very deep blue.

“Mr. McGee, any reasonably honest man in the construction industry either sets up his own CIA or he goes broke.”

Deep blue sapphires, star sapphires, dark Burmese rubies, star rubies.

Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.

I opened the package and took out the imitation gem. It was deep blue, big as a songbird’s egg, with a bright and perfect star.

There is as much danger in overestimating as in underestimating the quality of the opposition.