Top 66 Quotes About John A Macdonald
#1. If Sir John A. MacDonald or any other leader of that day were here now, he would have a different program from that of sixty years ago. He sought to give his people policies suited to the time in which he lived.
John Bracken
#3. A new Member requires the experience of his first session in the House to teach him how to hang up his overcoat and take his seat in a manner befitting a gentlemen.
John A. Macdonald
#4. Anybody may support me when I am right. What I want is someone that will support me when I am wrong.
John A. Macdonald
#5. The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.
John D. MacDonald
#6. After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility.
John D. MacDonald
#7. O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.
John D. MacDonald
#8. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
John D. MacDonald
#9. What true materialist would settle for a MacDonald's hamburger?
John Gardner
#10. Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn't happen, if they all had to use hammers and knives?
John D. MacDonald
#12. Her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some grey ash where the fires had been.
John D. MacDonald
#13. You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.
John D. MacDonald
#14. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.
John D. MacDonald
#15. You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.
John D. MacDonald
#16. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?
Kingsley Amis
#17. In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl.
John D. MacDonald
#18. When a man has done me an evil turn once, I don't like to give him the opportunity to do so twice.
John A. Macdonald
#19. Saturday night. Buddy Dow, hired skipper of a big lunker owned by an insurance company in Atlanta, had enlisted two recruits and was despairingly in need of more.
John D. MacDonald
#20. 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.
Travis McGee, 1985
John D. MacDonald
#22. Sister, I do what I do, and I do it better than most, and I take some satisfaction in that. I am like a very dependable dog. They throw a stick into a jungle and I can go in there and bring it back.
John D. MacDonald
#24. Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian!
John A. Macdonald
#25. It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.
John D. MacDonald
#26. Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.
John D. MacDonald
#27. There are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake.
John D. MacDonald
#28. 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
#29. Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?
John D. MacDonald
#30. Confederation is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone.
John A. Macdonald
#31. It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.
John D. MacDonald
#32. Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.
John D. MacDonald
#33. He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before.
John D. MacDonald
#34. Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one!
John A. Macdonald
#36. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#38. It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
John D. MacDonald
#39. I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.
John D. MacDonald
#41. He chuckled and pulled himself to his feet. "End of session, McGee. Good night and good luck." At the door he turned and said, "I'll have you checked out, of course. Just for the hell of it. I'm a careful and inquisitive man.
John D. MacDonald
#42. At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.
John D. MacDonald
#43. I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald
#44. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?
John D. MacDonald
#45. We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald
#46. As for myself, my course is clear. A British subject I was born - a British subject I will die. With my utmost effort, with my latest breath, will I oppose the 'veiled treason' which attempts by sordid means and mercenary proffers to lure our people from their allegiance.
John A. Macdonald
#47. When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate.It is a visceral recognition. I told myself I was getting too fanciful and went to bed.
John D. MacDonald
#48. His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.
John D. MacDonald
#49. Settled for a blooming redhead from Waco, Takes-us, name of Molly Bea Archer, carefully cut her out of the pack and trundled her, tipsy and willing, back to the Busted Flush.
John D. MacDonald
#50. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.
Stephen King
#51. Somebody has to be tireless or the fast buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.
John D. MacDonald
#52. every day, not matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.
John D. MacDonald
#53. When fortune empties her chamber pot on your head, smile and say We are going to have a summer shower.
John A. Macdonald
#54. Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?" "It doesn't matter." "Which would you rather do?" The effort of decision brought her out of her torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. "I guess I have to be with you.
John D. MacDonald
#55. I just don't know. Maybe I'm good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.
John D. MacDonald
#56. John 8:44 says Satan is a liar and the father of lies. He captures and conquers men's lives through his convincing lies, often nullifying good intentions with wrongful actions that seemed manly in the moment but in the end lacked the balancing power of clarity.
James MacDonald
#57. All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.
John D. MacDonald
#58. He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.
John D. MacDonald
#59. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.
John D. MacDonald
#60. If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.
John D. MacDonald
#61. [To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.
John D. MacDonald
#62. Victims, he thought, were birds and animals and people who arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, usually in too big a hurry.
John D. MacDonald
#63. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.
John D. MacDonald
#64. When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
John D. MacDonald
#65. It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.
John D. MacDonald
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