Ross Macdonald Quotes

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

I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to tak...

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

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

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar s...

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

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

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

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

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flo...

The apparent facts, if you like. I'm not a philosopher. We lawyers don't deal in ultimate realities....

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

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

The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present ...

Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when y...

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

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there wer...

It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was lar...

You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don't you?""I want it very badly," I said. ...

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

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

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made...

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