Quotes from Ross MacDonald

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.

He made a production out of answering her, marching around to her side of the car, carrying his belly in front of him like a gift.

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.

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.

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

Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.

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.

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

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.

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

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

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm.

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.

his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery.

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.

daughter?' 'She was a beautiful child.' Mrs Williams's eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress.

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.

The tea tasted like a clear dark dripping from the past. My grandmother came back with it, in crisp black funeral silks

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.

It was midnight when I parked my car under Union Square. A wet wind blew across the almost deserted square, blowing fogged breath from the sea on the dark pavements. Flashing neons on all four sides repudiated the night.

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

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

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