Ross Macdonald Quotes

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

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

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

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

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.

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

As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.

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

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

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

The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

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

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.

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

Somewhere out of sight a punching-bag was rat-tat-tatting on a board. I stepped through a doorless aperture opposite the door I'd come in by, and found myself in the main hall. It was comparatively small, with seats for maybe a thousand rising on four sides to the girders that held up the roof. An ingot of lead-gray light from a skylight fell through the moted air onto the empty roped square on the central platform. Still no people, but you could tell that people had been there. The same air had hung for months in the windowless building, absorbing the smells of human sweat and breath, roasted peanuts and beer, white and brown cigarettes, Ben Hur perfume and bay rum and hair oil and tired feet. A social researcher with a good nose could have written a Ph.D. thesis about that air.

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

It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee- and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she'd brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand.

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.

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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.

A cockroach stepped out from behind the ketchup, gave me a quick impassive once-over, decided that I was of the Brahmin faith, and walked earnestly across the table on errands of his own. Somebody had left a newspaper on the bench beside me, and I picked it up and swatted the cockroach, permitting his soul to transmigrate into the body of a quartermaster.

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

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.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

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.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

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

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

Money costs too much.

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.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

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

A woman of about sixty answered the door. She had blue-white hair and a look on her face you don't see too often any more, the look of a woman who hasn't been disappointed: 'Yes,

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.

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

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.

It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Crimes often come in pairs.

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.

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

We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you're always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint.

We had reached the foot of Sable's hill. Howell wrestled his car up the climbing curves. The tires shuddered and screeched like lost souls under punishment.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

had chewed and swallowed it, he said: "I don't generally let the language flow around here. People, the richer they get, the more they dislike to hear a Negro express himself in well-chosen words. I guess they feel there's no point in being rich unless you can feel superior to somebody. I study English on the college level, but if I talked that way I'd lose my job. People are very sensitive.

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.

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

I had a counter impulse to walk out of the bar and away from the Hacienda and her. She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to. And succeeding. I raised my drink and said with false cheer: 'Luck to the gold drinkers.' She sipped at hers.'You didn't say what kind of luck, good or bad. Not that it matters, people don't get their wishes. Wishing-wells are to drown in. But I mustn't go on like that. I'm always pitying myself, and that's neurotic.' She made a visible effort, and focused her attention on me: 'Speaking of luck, you don't as if you had too much luck in your life. Some of the kicks you say you go for were kicks in the head, I bet'.

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

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

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

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

What did the old man want?" "Your husband's money, just like everyone else." "But not you, eh?" Her voice was sardonic. "Not me," I said. "Money costs too much.

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard.

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

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.

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

...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.

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.

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

Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks - the tracks were there - the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake.

She walked as she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt.

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

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

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

She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.

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