Quotes from Ross MacDonald

I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea. The

Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.

The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard.

She looked up at the sun as if it were spying on her.

A woman with thyroid eyes and chins sat behind the desk in the deserted lobby. She offered me a room with bath for two-fifty, two dollars without. I didn't really want to stay there. The migrant years had flown through the place and left their droppings.

The flagstone terrace overlooked a golf course. At the bottom of its green slopes lay a dazzling band of sea. Twenty or thirty miles out, a string of brown hunchbacked islands lay on the bright horizon like basking tortoises. The woman looked at the Pacific and its islands as if they belonged to her. I found out later that one of them did.

innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts.

Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love

A door sprang open as if it knew Spanish

He sat down with great caution, after inspecting the chair for concealed electrodes, and made me the gift of his card.

I went to the bar against the third wall and ordered a beer. "Bass ale, Black Horse, Carta Blanca, or Guinness stout? We don't serve domestic beer after six o'clock." I

She lived in a frame cottage on a hillside overlooking the distant campus. The front yard was choked with a dozen varieties of cactus, some of which speared as high as the roof. The house needed paint and it hung on the slope a little off balance, like its tenant.

Sheriff Ostervelt snapped his black case shut and tucked it under his hamlike arm. He went to Mildred, walking like a bear on its hind legs, and laid a large red paw on her shoulder. "Coming along with me, little girl?" She shrank at his touch. "I'll ride with Mr. Archer. He brought me here.

Nothing happened when I pressed the bellpush. I knocked on the door. Slowly, like twin bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side of it.

He was a man of fifty-five or so wearing an open-necked white shirt from which his head jutted like a weathered statue.

Why not?" I said. "The night is young." I was lying. The night was old and chilly, with a slow heartbeat. The tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top. The neons along the Strip glared with insomnia.

He had black eyes like his mother's, and short brown hair which stuck up all over his head like visible excitement.

Her voice was low and dry and monotonous, the voice of a vicious boredom. It affected me like a rattlesnake's buzzing signal.

Her expression seemed to keep changing, from grief and fear and dismay to cold indifference. I wondered what caused the changes, or if my mind had conspired with the lights to half imagine them.

Are you a member?" The question was rhetorical. "Mrs. Caswell asked me to meet her here." She underwent a personality change which almost cracked her makeup. "Oh. Excuse me, sir. If you'll sign the register - I believe Ms. Caswell is in the bar.

She went on looking like exactly what she was: a hard blonde beauty in her fading thirties, fighting the world with two weapons, sex and money. Both of her weapons had turned in her hands and scarred her.

Do you know what I wish at this moment?" she said. "I wish I had no money and no sex. They're both more trouble than they're worth to me.

I'm just a floating question-mark, waiting for an answer to hook onto me.