Quite a few people emailed to thank me for posting Selected Excerpts from The Deep Blue Good-By — there are a lot of Travis McGee fans out there, I guess. Here’s the first part of my selected excerpts from The Quick Red Fox (1964):

“I wondered how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind.”

“Before you bet, you count what’s in the pot.”

“[She looked] like a fifty-peso floozy in a back-room circus in Juarez.”

“A man likes the illusion of exclusive option, even on the most temporary basis.”

“Bed is the simplest thing two people can do. If it goes with a lot of other things, it can be important, and if it goes with nothing else, it isn’t worth the time it takes.”

“Sexually disturbed people try to be the sword of the Lord, going around slaying the sinful.”

“Holding something alive, warm, sleeping is like handling fresh moist soil under the sun’s heat. Restorative.”

“I felt like a jackass adolescent who’d tried to tell a dirty joke in front of real people.”

“Self-evaluation… is the skin rash of the emotionally insecure.”

“Venus de Milo would have looked like hell in stretch pants.”

“A person can not endure inexplicable worthlessness. So they establish the pattern of proving themselves worthless.”

“I hum sad songs all day without making a single sound.”

“We can defend ourselves from our enemies, and even from our friends, but never from our family.”

“For the soul to be offended it must first exist.”

“He… had the animal’s awareness of something not quite right.”

“[We] sat like dulled passengers in a heavy train sidetracked at the end of noplace.”

“A man like that can’t believe anything that doesn’t sound crooked.”

“[He] looked at me with the concealed anguish of a toothless crocodile inspecting a fat brown dog on the river bank.”

“Ever since the popularization of the Freud-Fraud, we are all addicted to fingering ourselves to see where it hurts, Mommy. With no one to kiss and make well.”

“… it looked as if [his] nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction.”

“All the old pilgrims [to Las Vegas] wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion.”

“…[as] dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope.”

“Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after.”

“Violence is the stepchild of desperation.”