The Turquoise Lament Quotes

“I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuric-acid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh?”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament

“Gian Gravina? ‘A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.’ ”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament

“at a hundred and seventy miles an hour on its hundred and eighty horses. Coop is always ecstatic at the chance to fly me anywhere in the state. I buy the gas and pay the landing fees. He can’t charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit. The FAA classifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane. Coop paid $7200 for the kit. He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit. He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthiness certificate”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament

“Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought.”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament

“We are all at the mercy of the hostility of the service industry.”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament

“We are all at the mercy of the hostility”
― John D. MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament