Ross Macdonald quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ross Macdonald

Ross Macdonald Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ross Macdonald on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

There's a contradiction in your thinking," I said. "If I took your dirty money, you wouldn't be able to trust my honesty.

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

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.

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

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

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

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

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

dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar.

Even with tear gas, tommy guns and a police cordon, there is no way to take a desperate man without risking your life.

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.

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

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

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

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

Don't be silly," he said uncertainly. "Now, what's your problem? If you think you're broke, I'm broker, ask my broker.

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

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

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

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

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.

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

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

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

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

Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love,

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

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

She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.

She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold.

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

Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

If you can't pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole.

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

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

Crimes often come in pairs.

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.

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.

All you men still have the Victorian hangover. I suppose you think woman's place is in the home, too?"
"Not my home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money costs too much.

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

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

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

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

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

An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing.

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.

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

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No more guns for you.

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

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

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

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.