Ross Macdonald famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Passion #People #Justice
Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Funny #Witty #Powerful
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Wall #Book #Past
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Running #Detectives #Vibrations
Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Lying #Heart #Envy
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

#Broken #Wish #Locks
An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.
-- Ross Macdonald

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

#Writing #Years #Different
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

#Memories #Moving #Sea
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.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Trouble #Allowance #Members
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.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Trying #Influence #Made
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Wall #Book #Language
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

#Men #Getting Older #Likes
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Archer #Kind #Novel
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

#Writing #Life And Death #Needs
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.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Games #Oil #Car
I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Hurt #Moving #Bird
The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.
-- Ross Macdonald

#Rattlesnakes #Frightened #Sensitivity
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

#Hands #Giving #Littles

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