Ross Macdonald Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

Ross Macdonald
"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"
"I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."

Ross Macdonald
The walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its dangers. I hated to get up.

Ross Macdonald
They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.

Ross Macdonald
Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure.

Ross Macdonald
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
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
The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

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

Ross Macdonald
Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth.

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

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