Top 100 Ross Macdonald Quotes
#1. A taste of whiskey had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper.
Ross Macdonald
#2. He gave me an appealing look, which fell with a thud between us:
Ross Macdonald
#3. My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.
Ross Macdonald
#4. When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.
Ross Macdonald
#5. I'm sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.' I
Ross Macdonald
#6. Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.
Ross Macdonald
#7. We treat the crime capital of the United States as if it was a second Disneyland, smelling like roses, a great place to take the family or hold a convention.
Ross Macdonald
#8. Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.
Ross Macdonald
#9. I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.
Ross Macdonald
#10. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
Ross Macdonald
#11. Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?"
I felt it. I took it easy.
Ross Macdonald
#12. ...Miss Seeley came in.... She was a little older, a little thinner. Her tailored pinstriped suit emphasized the boniness of her figure. But she still wore hopeful white ruffles at her wrists and throat.
Ross Macdonald
#13. The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.
Ross Macdonald
#14. The tea tasted like a clear dark dripping from the past. My grandmother came back with it, in crisp black funeral silks,
Ross Macdonald
#15. I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for.
Ross Macdonald
#16. Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm.
Ross Macdonald
#17. I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea. The
Ross Macdonald
#18. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross Macdonald
#19. At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy.
Ross Macdonald
#20. I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I'm not going to lose it.
Ross Macdonald
#21. She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn't look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet.
Ross Macdonald
#22. There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
Ross Macdonald
#23. The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.
Ross Macdonald
#25. She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness.
Ross Macdonald
#26. Some of us start out whole and stay that way.
Some need a spare part or two.
Henry - he was a bits-and-pieces kind of guy
Ross Macdonald
#27. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
Ross Macdonald
#28. On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.
Ross Macdonald
#29. Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.
Ross Macdonald
#30. The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
Ross Macdonald
#31. I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.
Ross Macdonald
#32. Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.
Ross Macdonald
#33. We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
Ross Macdonald
#34. People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody's living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it isn't working too well.
Ross Macdonald
#35. A thin woman about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet.
Ross Macdonald
#36. We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.
Ross Macdonald
#37. I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it.
Ross Macdonald
#38. The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.
Ross Macdonald
#39. Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love,
Ross Macdonald
#40. All you men still have the Victorian hangover. I suppose you think woman's place is in the home, too?"
"Not my home.
Ross Macdonald
#41. I'm a sharpshooter. I still don't like to kill a man. It's too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.
Ross Macdonald
#42. He wouldn't look at me. He stood against the wall, trying to merge with the wall.
Ross Macdonald
#43. She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.
Ross Macdonald
#44. Why wasn't he arrested?" "He was, but they couldn't convict him. Don't ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians.
Ross Macdonald
#45. his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery.
Ross Macdonald
#46. He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.
Ross Macdonald
#47. You notice things."
"A sexburger like her I notice." The tip of his tongue protruded between his teeth, which were a good grade of plastic.
Ross Macdonald
#48. The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.
Ross Macdonald
#49. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out.
Ross Macdonald
#50. As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.
Ross Macdonald
#51. Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.
Ross Macdonald
#52. If you can't pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole.
Ross Macdonald
#53. A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything.
Ross Macdonald
#54. What brings you up to the City? he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there's only one city.
Ross Macdonald
#55. daughter?' 'She was a beautiful child.' Mrs Williams's eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress.
Ross Macdonald
#56. He made a production out of answering her, marching around to her side of the car, carrying his belly in front of him like a gift.
Ross Macdonald
#57. As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write.
Ross Macdonald
#58. For answer, he threw off the covers, swung his legs over the edge of the high bed, reached for the floor with his bare feet, and stood up tottering. Then he fell forward onto his knees, his head swinging loose, slack as a killed buck.
Ross Macdonald
#59. He hadn't wanted to be helped the way I wanted to help him, the way that helped me.
Ross Macdonald
#60. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
Ross Macdonald
#61. I wondered if we were doing him a favor. The Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir. But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.
Ross Macdonald
#62. She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold.
Ross Macdonald
#63. I've spilled all my secrets. How do you make people do it?" "I don't. People like to talk about what's hurting them. It takes the edge off the pain sometimes.
Ross Macdonald
#65. He placed me in a straight chair against the wall, brought me an ashtray, sat at his desk with his back to the window. He was quick in movement, very still in repose. His bald scalp and watchful eyes made him resemble a lizard waiting for a fly to expose itself.
Ross Macdonald
#66. Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east.
Ross Macdonald
#67. Mrs. Gley came down in a rush. She had on a kind of tea gown whose draperies flew out behind her, like the tail of a blowzy comet.
Ross Macdonald
#68. I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.
Ross Macdonald
#69. She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object.
Ross Macdonald
#70. innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts.
Ross Macdonald
#72. Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces.
Ross Macdonald
#73. There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn't be, arson committed by children playing with matches. I
Ross Macdonald
#75. There's a contradiction in your thinking," I said. "If I took your dirty money, you wouldn't be able to trust my honesty.
Ross Macdonald
#76. I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.
Ross Macdonald
#78. The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.
Ross Macdonald
#79. I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I'm still going through the motions.
Ross Macdonald
#80. He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.
Ross Macdonald
#81. In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.
Ross Macdonald
#82. The apparent facts, if you like. I'm not a philosopher. We lawyers don't deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances.
Ross Macdonald
#83. Like other self-educated men, he was vain of his vocabulary.
Ross Macdonald
#84. Even with tear gas, tommy guns and a police cordon, there is no way to take a desperate man without risking your life.
Ross Macdonald
#85. Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.
Ross Macdonald
#86. How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?
Ross Macdonald
#87. His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power.
Ross Macdonald
#88. My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.
Ross Macdonald
#89. An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing.
Ross Macdonald
#90. Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.
Ross Macdonald
#91. Anton was in his office, short and wide behind the desk in a gabardine suit the color of lemon ice cream. His face was sunlamp brown.
Ross Macdonald
#93. Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother's knee and other low joints,
Ross Macdonald
#94. Don't be silly," he said uncertainly. "Now, what's your problem? If you think you're broke, I'm broker, ask my broker.
Ross Macdonald
#95. There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.
Ross Macdonald
#96. No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.
Ross Macdonald
#97. It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.
Ross Macdonald
#98. I opened the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder heavily. I moved back. I preferred a less complicated kind of pillow, stuffed with feathers, not memories and frustrations.
Ross Macdonald
#100. I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters.
Ross Macdonald
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