Mandy > Mandy's Quotes

“I could dance with disaster and grin to the end.”
― Glen Cook, Bleak Seasons

“And he was limp, a stringless puppet”
― Max Allan Collins, Quarry

“Maybe we should talk when you've calmed down."
"Okay, then. Call me back next year.”
― Max Allan Collins, Quarry

“A black book. The only book permitted in the Commonwealth. A fitting emblem that, a fitting contradiction. They were a people who called slavery freedom, a nation that called narrative truth, a culture that glorified its People by destroying the very concept of personhood. How could they be anything but a nation of book burners founded on a book?”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Kingdoms of Death

“Lately, light’s not as bright as once it was.”
― Ellen Kushner, Thomas the Rhymer

“Don’t make a noise, or I’ll send the devil a henchman!”
― Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan

“He looked up at me and his face was now innocent and pleading. "Am I truly damned, captain? Am I bound for Hell?"

I could not reply.

When he was dead I raised myself to my feet and I looked about me. Everything was still. A loneliness had come upon my soul.

There was darkness everywhere now but in the forest. And even here there were wisps of grey, as if evil crept in.

I lifted my head to the sky and shook my fist, "Oh, I reject you. I reject your Heaven and I reject your hell. Do as you wish with me, but know that your desires are petty and your ambitions have no meaning!"

I addressed no-one. I addressed the universe. I addressed a void.”
― Michael Moorcock, The War Hound and the World's Pain

“With some of the wives of old friends I have been able to quench that initial antagonism. They soon find out that I am aware of what every single person knows—that the world is always a little out of focus when there is no one who gives the final total damn about whether you live or die. It is the price you pay for being a rambler, and if you don't read the price tag, you are a dull one indeed.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“I sat on my heels and squinted up at her. Dark red hair and disapproval, outlined against a blue December sky. "Win a few, lose a few, honey," I said.

"What are you" she asked.

I stood up and put my hands on her upper arms, near the shoulders and plucked her up off the sawhorse and held her. Maybe I was smiling at her. I wouldn't know. What I was saying seemed to come from a strange direction, as if I were standing several feet behind myself. I said some nonsense about smelling these things out, about sensing the quickest way to open people up, and so you do it, because if you don't, then maybe you miss one little piece of something you should know, and then you go join the long long line of the dead ones, because you were careless.

"And," I heard myself say, "Tush killed himself but not with that damned engine block. He killed himself with something he said, or something he did, and he didn't know he was killing himself. Maybe he didn't listen very good, or catch on soon enough. I listen very good. I catch on. And when I add up this tab and name the price, I'm going to look at some nice gray skin, honey. Gray and pale, oily and guilty as hell, and some eyes shifting around looking for some way out of it. But every damned door will be nailed shut.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“He was such a weak, miserable, unsatisfying target. He still thought he was one of the good guys. I tried to reach him a little.

"If you could bring in a thousand-percent profit a day, LaFrance, I wouldn't throw pocket change on the duck there in front of you. If I was on fire, I wouldn't buy water from you. I came prowling for you, LaFrance. If the thing you loved most in the world was that face you wear, I would have changed it permanently, little by little. If your most precious possession was a beautiful wife, she'd be right down there below in the master stateroom waiting for you leave so I could get back to her. If you juggled for a living, friend, you'd now have broken wrists and broken elbows."

"What the hell is the matter with you?"

"Get off the boat. Go ashore. Tush Bannon was one of the best friends I ever had. All you give a damn about is money, so that's where I hit you."

"Best ... friend?" he whispered.

And I watched the gray appear. That gray like a wet stone. Gray for fright. Gray for guilt. Gray for despair. His mouth worked. "You ... rooned me, all right. Ever'thing I worked all my life for is gone. You finished me off, McGee."

"Wait a minute," Meyer said. "Maybe I've got an idea."

LaFrance came to point like a good bird dog. "Yes? Yes? What?"

Meyer smiled at him benignly. "The answer was staring us right in the face all the time. It's so simple! What you do is kill yourself!"

LaFrance stared at him, tried to comprehend the joke, tried to even smile, but the smile fell away. Meyer's smile stayed put.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Do yourself a favor. Go kill yourself. Then you won't even know or care if you're broke. Maybe it hurts a little, but just for a split second. Use a gun or a rope, or go jump off something high. Go ahead. Die a little.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Meyer, scowling, pinched the bridge of his nose. "Me! Did you hear me? On the sidewalk if there is a bug, I change my step and miss him. For me the business of the hooks almost spoils fishing. Me! I don't understand it. Such rotten anger I had, Travis! Thick in the throat like a sickness. Oh, he won't kill himself. Not that one. He'll live on and on so he can whine. But it was like changing your step to squash the bug, not flat, just a little squash so he can crawl a little bit slow, leaking his juices. McGee, my friend, I am ashamed of that kind of anger. I am ashamed of being able to do something like that. I said to myself when I first got into your line of ... endeavor, I said --- forgive me for saying this to you --- I said I will go only so far into it. There are things McGee does that somehow hurt McGee, hurt him in the way he thinks of himself. I talked to Muggsie. This business of the pretty little woman who just somehow happened to go off with Hero, that wasn't pretty, and you ere punishing something in yourself. Now I find myself a little bit less in my own eyes. Maybe this is a bad business you're in, Travis. Is there this kind of ugly anger in a man that waits for some kind of virtuous excuse? Was it there in me, waiting for a reason only? Travis, my friend, is this the little demonstration of how half the evil in the world is done in the name of honor?"

He wanted help I couldn't give him. One does not pat a Meyer on the head and give him a lollypop. He had overturned one of the personal stones in my garden too, and I could watch leggedy things scuttling away into comforting darkness.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Simon Templar, in all his years of wandering and adventure, had only fallen for one woman, and that was Patricia Holm. Therefor, as might have been expected, he fell heavily. And yet—he was realising it dimly, as one might realise an unthinkable heresy—in the eighteen months that they had been together he had started to get used to her. He had, he realised, been growing out of the first ecstatic wonder; and the thing that had taken its place had been so quiet and insidious that it had enchanted him while he was still unaware of it. It had had to await this shock to be revealed.

And the revelation, when it came, carried with it a wonder that infinitely eclipsed the more blatant brilliance of the first wonder that had slipped away. This was the kind of wild and awful wonder that might overtake a man who, having walked in the sunshine all the days of his life, sees the sun itself for the first time, with a dreadful and tremendous understanding and sees at once a vision of the darkness that would lie over the world if the sun ceased from shining.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Saint Closes the Case