Ross Macdonald Quotes

26 quotes in 447 categories

• Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
• 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…
• 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…
• The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a…
• The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
• 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.…
• The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.
• An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.
• The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.
• I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.
• 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.
• 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…
• Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.
• The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
• 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…

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