Quotes by Ross MacDonald

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

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

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

“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 he...”

“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.”

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

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

“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 cal...”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 ...”

“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 Im not going to lose it.”

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

“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...”

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

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

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

“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 j...”