Pale Gray for Guilt Quotes

“I leaned over and slapped his face sideways and backhanded it back to center position.

"Manners," I said.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“So!"

"So?"

So I don't think you drove that one off. So it was her choice. So she isn't the kind who says it is for good and then come back all of a sudden. With her, gone is gone. So if I were you, I would be just as bad off as you look. Or worse. So if I were you and one like that was gone for good, I'd miss hell out of her and wonder if maybe I'd handled things a little differently some how, I could have kept her around permanently."

"That's enough about 'so.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“I awakened on Monday with the impression that I might have to get up and bang my head against the wall to get my heart started.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It's short-term. It's a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It's a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair."
"And you are comparatively large but fair."
"I think of myself that way. Where did the check go? Into the pocket so fast? Good." he looked at his watch. "I am taking a lady to lunch. Make a nice neat deck there, Captain." And away he went, humming.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“In all emotional conflicts the thing you find hardest to do is the thing you should do.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“More fun than a hungover, carbuncled cowboy might have while trying to stay aboard a longhorn, in a dusty rodeo, but it would be a close decision”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happy-meter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymbals. Not that I want to say it isn't music.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt

“Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway.
The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.”
― John D. MacDonald, Pale Gray for Guilt