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

by John D. MacDonald

Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work.

Never sit in the first row at the ballet.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

What an astonishment these night thoughts would induce in the carefree companions of blithe Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject from a structured society. But pity, indignation and guilt are the things best left hidden from all the gay companions. Take them out at night.

“I think maybe you’re clever. But he’s sly. He’s animal-sly. You know the difference?”

So you use your face to make faces with, play parts, pick up cues. 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. Were this not so, there would be no place left to hide.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.

Pride quickly rebuilds the fallen walls. And refashions the past to fit its own requirements.

Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients.

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.