Ross Macdonald > Quotes

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

“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

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

“She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Wycherly Woman

“The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Instant Enemy

“He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

“Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Chill

“I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
― Ross MacDonald, The Goodbye Look

“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, The Far Side of the Dollar

“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, The Blue Hammer

“No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target

“Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.”
― Ross Macdonald, Black Money

“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, The Drowning Pool

“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, The Moving Target

“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, The Moving Target

“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”
― Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty

“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, The Moving Target

“He hadn’t wanted to be helped the way I wanted to help him, the way that helped me.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters

“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, The Moving Target

“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 Chill

“She said surprisingly, in a voice as thin as a flute:
"Are you a good man?"
"I like to think so," but her candor stopped me. "No," I said, "I'm not. I keep trying, when I remember to, but it keeps getting tougher every year. Like trying to chin yourself with one hand. You can practice off and on all your life, and never make it.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast

“No more guns for you.”
― Ross Macdonald

“We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Goodbye Look

“Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Chill

“That isn’t your real motivation. I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don’t you admit it?” “I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Goodbye Look

“It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Lew Archer Omnibus

“My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

“She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour.”
― Ross Macdonald, Find a Victim

“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 Drowning Pool

“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, The Galton Case