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DEEP_BLUE_Q

                                             March 7, 2019

                                                       DEEP_BLUE

I had an external link to a collection of Travis McGee
quotes, which has of course gone dead. You can't rely
on anyone these days.

I'm raiding the other various quote lists for samples,
and cut-and-pasting on the theory that I'm more
reliable than they are (which feels like a weird claim,
but you know, in comparison...):

https://256stuff.com/gray/quotes/john_macdonald/the_deep_blue_good_bye.shtml

  "... I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am
  wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as
  plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs,
  retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time
  clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics,
  deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties,
  lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of
  commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."

  "I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess 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."

  "I am also wary of all earnestness."

                       Travis McGee, in John D. MacDonald's
                       "The Deep Blue Goodbye" (1964)

An excellent dead-pan meta-joke there...  to this day
I'm not sure if it was an un-selfconscious accident
(it could be it's an intentional self-contradiction
deployed as self-deprecating humor).


  "... These are the playmate years, and they are
  demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to
  be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom
  sex is a pleasant social favor. The new
  culture. And they are indeed present and
  available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a
  curious tastelessness about them. A woman who
  does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of
  very much value to anyone else. They become a
  pretty little convenience, like a guest
  towel. And the cute little things they say, and
  their dainty little squeals of pleasure and
  release are as contrived as the embroidered
  initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of
  pride, complexity and emotional tension is
  genuinely worth the act of love ..."

                       Travis McGee, in John D. MacDonald's
                       "The Deep Blue Goodbye" (1964)

Another thing that's fradulent is McGee/MacDonald's
having-it-both ways-- McGee sleeps with these women when he
feels like it, but he's better than they are because he feels
guilty about it.  And the prideful/complex/emotional ones tend
to run off or die young to clear the decks for the sexual
adventures of the next book.


  "... a frightening number of people in the world
  are unaware of the actual living reality of the
  human beings around them. It is the complete
  absence of empathy in action. They believe
  themselves to be real, of course, yet they merely
  lack the imagination to see that other persons
  are also real in the same way and on the same
  terms. Thus, even though they go through the
  obligatory social forms and personal
  relationships, all other people are objects
  rather than people. If all other people are
  objects, then there can be no psychic trauma
  involved in treating them as objects."

                 Travis McGee, in John D. MacDonald's
                 "Darker Than Amber" (1966)


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