John D. MacDonald Quotes

Lonely Silver Rain (1985)

From the Travis McGee Series

• It's a funny thing about television and cigarettes. Hardly anybody I know anymore smokes cigarettes or watches the tube. One stunts the body and one stunts the mind.
• In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing. It is a companion in the night. Each boat has its own manner and character.
• Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people. To them I had become a sun-brown rough-looking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits -- either sexual or pharmacological -- who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday's clothes. But the worst realization was that they bore me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functionals, and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men -- all hair and lethargy -- were so laid back as to have become immobile.

• Memory of a rumbling voice of the grandpa long ago: "Anything you can't take care of, kid, you don't deserve to own. A dog, a gun, a reel, a bike or a woman. You learn how to do it and you do it, because if you don't you hate yourself."

  An out-of-date morality. Anything you don't take care of, you replace.

• [...] [That] is the vulnerable segment of all foolproof systems, the fools who take care of it.

• [...] an ex-employee of the DEA [...] said, in part, "It is valuable, small, easy to smuggle. As easy as diamonds, but unlike diamonds it is a fashionable consumable. It is psychologically habituating without being physiologically addictive. It is the smart party snort for the young, middle-class, halfsuccessful, upwardly mobile professional, as well as for the career thief. It can provide a risk of extreme confidence accompanied by erotic fervor and torrents of oratory. It can also rot the nose and encourage suicidal driving habits. It is so expensive it has the cachet of conspicuous consumption at parties peopled by musicians, artists and writers, the sign of a gracious contemporary hostess.

  "A vast and deadly infrastructure provides it -- from the plucking of the leaves of the highland bushes to the tiny gold straw that sucks a line into the delicate nostril of a mayor's mistress in Oregon and makes her eyes sparkle. Within the present context, nothing can stop it. The losses of officialdom are within the limits, say, of spoilage in the vegetable business. Is has been brought in by drone aircraft, radio-controlled. It has been brought in by one-man submarine. It has been shot ashore by slingshot from freighters docking at Tampa. Even were importation to be punished by death it would still go on, because the lifetime wages of a laborer can be carried in a single pocket.

  "The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize it along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fashionable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won't die in the squalid massacres...

  "But maybe it is too late for legalization. The bureaucracy of detection and control has a huge national payroll... Legalization will be fought bitterly by politicians who will say that to do so will imperil our children. Are they not now imperiled?"

• Somewhere there are intelligent and highly skilled design engineers working the bugs out of ever more deadly weapons -- lasers to blind armies, multiple multiple warheads, heat beams to fry the crews inside their tanks. And they pack up the printouts and turn off the computers and have a knock with the guys on the way home to the kiddies. Somebody has to do it. Right?
• Piss and vinegar can't be summoned on command. The muted colors of a muted life will not suddenly brighten because you think it a good idea they should.
• In the last few years I had been ever more uncomfortably aware that one day, somewhere, I would take one last breath and a great iron door would slam shut, leaving me in darkness on the wrong side of the door. But now there was a window in that door. A promise of light. A way to continue.
• ... the hard thing to do is the right thing to do.

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