John D. MacDonald Quotes

The Quick Red Fox (1964)

From the Travis McGee Series

Trav meats Lysa Dean, famous Hollywood actress, who has been blackmailed and now threatened with some explicit photographs. Travis must track down the other clients of the blackmailer to find the source. His partner during the adventure is one Miss Dana Holtzer, an austere "Miss Efficiency". They have to find the killer before Lysa Dean becomes the next victim.

Next book: A Deadly Shade of Gold    Other John D. MacDonald Quotes.

• The public is an untrustworthy animal.
• After little
• I am not a nine to five animal. I cannot swallow the myths which say that nine to five is a Good Thing because that's the way nearly everybody else gets stuck. I cannot be an orderly consumer, with 2.3 kids and .7 new cars a year, and an after-hours secretarial arrangement. I am not properly acquisitive.
• I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.

• The dullest wire services the world has ever seen fill their little monopoly newspapers with self-congratulatory pap. Their radio is unspeakable. Their television is geared to a minimal approval by thirty million of them. And anything thirty million people like, aside from their more private functions, is bound to be bad. Their schools are group-adjustment centers, fashioned to same the rebellious. Their churches are weekly votes of confidence in God. Their politicians are enormously likable, never saying a cross word. The goods they buy grow increasingly shoddy each year, though brighter in color. For those who still read, they make do, for the most part, with the portentous gruntings of Uris, Wouk, Rand and others of that same witless ilk. Their magazine fare is fashioned by nervous committees.

  You see, dear, there is no one left to ask them a single troublesome question. Such as: Where have you been and where are you going and is it worth it.

• This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong, demanding that all the life and need within her be matched. Her instinct would immediately detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her -- and then she would be gone for good. Wholeness was all she could comprehend or accept.

Next book: A Deadly Shade of Gold    Other John D. MacDonald Quotes.

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