Best 32 quotes of Ross Macdonald on MyQuotes

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.

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.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

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

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.

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

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

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.

A few languid clouds moved inland over our heads. A little high plane was gamboling among them like a terrier in a henyard.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Only the blind had not seen Terry Neville.

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

She looked up at the sun as if it were spying on her.

Sheriff Ostervelt snapped his black case shut and tucked it under his hamlike arm. He went to Mildred, walking like a bear on its hind legs, and laid a large red paw on her shoulder. "Coming along with me, little girl?" She shrank at his touch. "I'll ride with Mr. Archer. He brought me here.

The flagstone terrace overlooked a golf course. At the bottom of its green slopes lay a dazzling band of sea. Twenty or thirty miles out, a string of brown hunchbacked islands lay on the bright horizon like basking tortoises. The woman looked at the Pacific and its islands as if they belonged to her. I found out later that one of them did.

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

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.

The waves came up towards us, fumbling and gnawing at the beach like an immense soft mouth.

Trying to get information out of a Los Angeles lawyer was like opening a can of sardines without a key.

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.

You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don't you?" "I want it very badly," I said. "But I can't take this money. It wouldn't belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot sets in.