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 Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

“She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.”

— Ross Macdonald

“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

“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

“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

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

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

“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

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

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

— Ross Macdonald

“No more guns for you.”

— Ross Macdonald

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

— 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

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

— Ross Macdonald

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.

— 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

“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

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

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

“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.”

— 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

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

— Ross Macdonald

“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.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

“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.”

— Ross Macdonald

“The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

“Crimes often come in pairs.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

“I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

“Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love,”

— Ross Macdonald

“She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn't look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet.”

— 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

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.

— Ross Macdonald

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.

— 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

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.

— Ross Macdonald

“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”

— 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

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

— Ross Macdonald

“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.”

— Ross Macdonald

“Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

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.

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald