99+ Ross Macdonald Quotes on Books, The Drowning Pool and Past - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Ross Macdonald quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Ross Macdonald quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Ross Macdonald wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Books, The Drowning Pool and Past

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

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

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

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

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops.

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

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.

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.

What brings you up to the City?” he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there’s only one city.

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.

We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.

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

It’s interesting to come back to your childhood home. And creepy, too, like becoming very young and very old, both at the same time. The spirit that haunts the house.’ That was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirt – very young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo. She.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

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.

There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn’t be, arson committed by children playing with matches. I.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

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 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.

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.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Way Some People Die Quotes

He was recovering his style, or whatever it was that kept him upright and made him interesting to women. On the shooting level he was a bum, as useless as a cat in a dogfight. But he had his own feline dignity, even with his hands up.

The Way Some People Die Quotes

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

The Doomsters Quotes

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

You'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes and sell his body for soap.

The Doomsters Quotes

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.

Law Quotes Lawyers Quotes The Galton Case Quotes

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.

The Way Some People Die Quotes

He placed me in a straight chair against the wall, brought me an ashtray, sat at his desk with his back to the window. He was quick in movement, very still in repose. His bald scalp and watchful eyes made him resemble a lizard waiting for a fly to expose itself.

The Doomsters Quotes

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.

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.

Army Quotes The Doomsters Quotes

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.

The Barbarous Coast Quotes

For answer, he threw off the covers, swung his legs over the edge of the high bed, reached for the floor with his bare feet, and stood up tottering. Then he fell forward onto his knees, his head swinging loose, slack as a killed buck.

The Barbarous Coast Quotes

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm.

The Barbarous Coast Quotes

If you can't pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole.

The Barbarous Coast Quotes

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.

The Way Some People Die Quotes

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.

The Way Some People Die Quotes

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

The Galton Case Quotes

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.

Parents and children Quotes The Far Side of the Dollar Quotes

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.

The Doomsters Quotes

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

The Galton Case Quotes

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 Galton Case Quotes

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.

The Doomsters Quotes

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