Quotes from Ross MacDonald

What did the old man want?" "Your husband's money, just like everyone else." "But not you, eh?" Her voice was sardonic. "Not me," I said. "Money costs too much.

The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.

Now take it easy . This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?" I felt it. I took it easy.

Some of us start out whole and stay that way. Some need a spare part or two. Henry - he was a bits-and-pieces kind of guy

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write.

Like other self-educated men, he was vain of his vocabulary.

Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east.

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.

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother's knee and other low joints

I like the sun." "Do you really? I didn't think you'd go in for simple things like sun. You're the neon type, aren't you?" "If you say so.

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

Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces.

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

I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters.

She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object.

A taste of whiskey had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper.

I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for.

Don't be silly," he said uncertainly. "Now, what's your problem? If you think you're broke, I'm broker, ask my broker.

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

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.

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

I went through a living room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom's jacket lay across the threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine.

She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn't look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet.