The End of the Night Quotes

“The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles. One”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“It would be such a crummy stupid way to die.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“When anyone seeks to reduce you, in your own eyes, to unimportance, you fight.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“they made a small, cheap thing of life.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“I felt as if all the furniture of my mind had been reupholstered in dusty black velvet.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“I had helped soap a dirty word on the biggest window in the world.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“She got sore at me and took it out on Shack who took it out on fatso. Tonight, when he gets home, he beats up on his old lady. She kicks the kid. The kid kicks the dog. The dog kills a cat. End of the line. Aggression always ends up with something dead, Kirboo. Remember that. It’s the only way to end the chain. She put the knife in Shack’s throat, that would have ended it. We’re all animals. Let’s get out of here.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“You need trouble?” he asked. “No. That’s what I was saying, fella. I don’t want trouble.” He turned away. Shack caught him in one stride, caught him by the forearm and spun him around. “I got mixed up,” Shack said. “I thought you were asking for trouble.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“Nan was loaded with dusky glamour.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“What’ll they do to a square?” Nan asked. “That’s what we’re checking out, man,”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“They’ll put you way out in front, college boy. They’ll get you off the curb and into the parade.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“This—is one of them?” “They beat and kicked and stabbed a stranger to death, Kemp. For no reason. What would you expect one of them to look like?” “I—don’t know. Like this, I guess.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“On her brows and her strong hands are those small random scars acquired by those whose lives are spent close to the edge of darkness.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“There was a sense of isolation about that house. It was as if the concrete steps were a rope ladder, and when you were up there, they were pulled up and you were alone.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“She came swinging toward me, a lovely little doll, and I had to grin at her, but her mouth did not move in response. She took off her glasses as I opened the car door for her. Her eyes were ten thousand years old. “Buy something pretty?” I asked her.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“I know, sir. With desires and aspirations and an immortal soul. But in the scheme of things, that joker was just about as significant as a gob of spit on a wet sidewalk, and just about as attractive.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“But I know what would happen to this kind of a journal. She would riffle it, see there was no art work, and drop it out the car window and go to work on her nails, or pick a fight with John, or curl into a tiny and fragrant cat nap.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“Once you have destroyed somebody, and there’s no way to put the pieces together, and you know you’re going to live with a funny kind of remorse the rest of your life anyway, you can maybe dilute remorse through more destruction.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“I don’t know, Kathy. There’s all the pressure to conform. I’m not ready to play on the team.” “Kicks? Is that what you want?”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“When she had a chance, she would buy a half dozen magazines. She would leaf through them very quickly, like an illiterate looking at the pictures, and drop them out the window one at a time as she finished them.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“We stood beside the car with the snow coming down, big wet flakes that caught in her hair.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“All the secretaries have the word to give him the brush job. Show biz, darling.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“And I kept thinking of Kathy Keats and how her back had felt under my hands, as if I could snap it like a stick.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night

“Doxie had brown hair, sleepwalking mannerisms, and looked about thirteen years old.”
― John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night