John D. MacDonald: Difference between revisions
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'''[[w:John D. MacDonald|John Dann MacDonald]]''' ([[July 24]], [[1916]] – [[December 28]], [[1986]])
== Quotes ==
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==== ''{{w|A Purple Place for Dying}}'' (1964) ====
* ...it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out in and earn a living rather than wasting 4 years in college. '''Education is something that should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool
* It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend.
** Final words
==== ''{{w|Nightmare in Pink}}'' (1964) ====
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* '''We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on.''' Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling {{w|Rocinante}} from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw... <br /> The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head. <br /> Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever."
* News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and a crackpot, Mary.
** Travis watches the news with Meyer, Chapter 22.
==== ''{{w|The Scarlet Ruse}}'' (1973) ====
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{{DEFAULTSORT:MacDonald, John D.}}
[[Category:Detective fiction authors]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Short story writers from the United States]]
[[Category:1916 births]]
[[Category:1986 deaths]]
[[Category:People from Pennsylvania]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Edgar Award winners]]
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