Ross Macdonald Quotes: top 80 famous quotes about Ross Macdonald

Ross Macdonald Quotes & Sayings

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Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again. — Ross Macdonald

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

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers. — Ross Macdonald

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

She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object. — Ross Macdonald

Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience. — Ross Macdonald

At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy. — Ross Macdonald

He gave me an appealing look, which fell with a thud between us: — Ross Macdonald

His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power. — Ross Macdonald

dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

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

He looked like a sleepwalker waking up on the verge of a precipice. — Ross Macdonald

He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage. — Ross Macdonald

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything. — Ross Macdonald

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

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution. — Ross Macdonald

A thin woman about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet. — Ross Macdonald

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on? — Ross Macdonald

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox. — Ross Macdonald

I'm sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.' I — Ross Macdonald

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. — Ross Macdonald

I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it. — Ross Macdonald

Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love, — Ross Macdonald

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to. — Ross Macdonald

She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold. — Ross Macdonald

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man. — Ross Macdonald

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

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. — Ross Macdonald

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

his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery. — Ross Macdonald

As if by behaving modestly and discreetly they could make the fire stay up on the mountain and die there, like an unwanted god. — Ross Macdonald

Crimes often come in pairs. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

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

He wouldn't look at me. He stood against the wall, trying to merge with the wall. — Ross Macdonald

Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces. — Ross Macdonald

innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts. — Ross Macdonald

No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly. — Ross Macdonald

Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence. — Ross Macdonald

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born. — Ross Macdonald

Like other self-educated men, he was vain of his vocabulary. — Ross Macdonald

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm. — Ross Macdonald

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms. — Ross Macdonald

Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring. — Ross Macdonald

The tea tasted like a clear dark dripping from the past. My grandmother came back with it, in crisp black funeral silks, — Ross Macdonald

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops. — Ross Macdonald

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves. — Ross Macdonald

He hadn't wanted to be helped the way I wanted to help him, the way that helped me. — Ross Macdonald

Money costs too much. — Ross Macdonald

daughter?' 'She was a beautiful child.' Mrs Williams's eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress. — Ross Macdonald

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing. — Ross Macdonald

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. — Ross Macdonald

I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people. — Ross Macdonald

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. — Ross Macdonald

An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing. — Ross Macdonald

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

What brings you up to the City? he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there's only one city. — Ross Macdonald

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness. — Ross Macdonald

My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing. — Ross Macdonald

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

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

I like the sun."
"Do you really? I didn't think you'd go in for simple things like sun. You're the neon type, aren't you?"
"If you say so. — Ross Macdonald

A taste of whiskey had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper. — Ross Macdonald

No more guns for you. — Ross Macdonald

The sun, heavy and red, was almost down on the horizon now. Its image floated like spilled fire on the water. The — Ross Macdonald

There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. — Ross Macdonald

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother's knee and other low joints, — Ross Macdonald

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