Quotes from Ross MacDonald

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 was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirt – very young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo. She

His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power.

He was recovering his style, or whatever it was that kept him upright and made him interesting to women. On the shooting level he was a bum, as useless as a cat in a dogfight. But he had his own feline dignity, even with his hands up.

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.

The sun, heavy and red, was almost down on the horizon now. Its image floated like spilled fire on the water. The

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything.

The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out.

Smoke if you like. I've given it up. It's so morale-building to have given up one of the vices. Of course I'd never have done it without that cancer scare to help me. Sheer terror can be awfully useful, don't you think?

Beyond a row of dwarf palms the sea was snoring and complaining like a drunk in a doorway.

The brown numbered doors [in the flophouse hallway] stood like upended coffins on each side, bathed in the static red flames of the fire-exit bulbs that dotted the ceiling at intervals.

Crimes often come in pairs.

I'm a sharpshooter. I still don't like to kill a man. It's too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.

You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don't you?" "I want it very badly," I said. "But I can't take this money. It wouldn't belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot sets in.

You understand my idea of a happy marriage is essentially anything that works.

Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years 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. There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

opened the front door with my left hand, my gun cocked in my right. A little man leaned toward me, peering into the fog with intent dead eyes. I caught him before he fell out. I'd been feeling death in my bones for twenty-four hours.

He was silent for a minute. His gaze moved past me and grew distant as if he was watching his daughter slip away over a receding horizon. I had no children, but I had given up envying people who had.

She was young and small, with a fine small head, its modeling emphasized by a short boyish haircut. She had on a dark business suit which her body filled the way grapes fill their skins.

She spoke with a kind of wilted gallantry. I looked at her. She'd leaned her head against the cracked leather seat, and closed her eyes. Without their light and depth in her face, she looked about thirteen. I caught myself up short, recognizing a feeling I'd had before. It started out as paternal sympathy but rapidly degenerated, if I let it. And Mildred had a husband.

Can you set her down at Burbank? I want to ask some questions." "I'm going to." The summer heat of the valley came up to meet us as we circled in. Heat lay like a fine ash on the rubbish lots and fields and half-built suburbs, slowing the tiny cars on the roads and boulevards, clogging the air.

She listened with her head bowed, biting one knuckle like a doleful child. But there was nothing childish about the look she gave me. It held a startled awareness, as if she'd had to grow up in a hurry, painfully. I had a feeling that she was the one who had suffered most in the family trouble.

chapter 5   I pressed the bell, and in a minute a rich female voice gurgled in the speaking-tube. "Who is it, please?" "Lew Archer. Is Morris home?

We treat the crime capital of the United States as if it was a second Disneyland, smelling like roses, a great place to take the family or hold a convention.