Quotes from Ross MacDonald

He gave me an appealing look, which fell with a thud between us:

had chewed and swallowed it, he said: "I don't generally let the language flow around here. People, the richer they get, the more they dislike to hear a Negro express himself in well-chosen words. I guess they feel there's no point in being rich unless you can feel superior to somebody. I study English on the college level, but if I talked that way I'd lose my job. People are very sensitive.

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.

The walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. I hated to get up.

Prince looked ready to slug me. I almost wished he would. Like most Americans, I was a counter-puncher.

I turned on my back and floated": The Drowning Pool

She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold.

Bess came out of her room. She had changed into a dress which had to be hooked up the back and I was elected to hook it up. Though she had a strokeable-looking back, my hands were careful not to wander. The easy ones were nearly always trouble: frigid or nympho. schizy or commercial or alcoholic, sometimes all five at once. Their nicely wrapped gifts of themselves often turned out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it.

A woman of about sixty answered the door. She had blue-white hair and a look on her face you don't see too often any more, the look of a woman who hasn't been disappointed: 'Yes

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.

The sunset spilled on the water and flared across the sky. The sky changed through several colors and became a soft crumbled gray. It was like walking under the roof of an enormous cave where hidden fires burned low.

The house belonged to the hashish school of Spanish architecture. Probably early nineteen-twenties and imitation Mizener, which made it the imitation of an imitation which wasn't worth imitating. It was a ponderous monstrosity with thick walls, meager windows, insane turrets. Somebody with a hidalgo complex had tried to jail a dream of happiness. The prisoner had probably died, or lost its mind.

I'm sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.' I

There is a kind of economy in life. You don't spend more than you have, or say more than you know, or throw your weight around more than necessary.

The electric clock in the kitchen said twenty after four. I found a box of frozen oysters in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator and made an oyster stew. My wife had never liked oysters. Now I could sit at my kitchen table at any hour of the day or night and eat oysters to my heart's content, building up my virility.

He looked at her with contempt, the contempt that silver might feel for sodden flesh. "She never could hold her liquor." "We were pub-crawling," I said. "We had a wizard do." He looked at me sharply. "Evidently. Now why should you be interested in a bag of worms like this?" "You're talking about the woman I love.

The tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top.

Perhaps you'd like a drink." "Not before lunch. I'm the new-type detective.

That was the trouble with alcohol as a sedative. It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.

The waves came up towards us, fumbling and gnawing at the beach like an immense soft mouth.

Only the blind had not seen Terry Neville.

You're taking this pretty seriously," I said. "Why don't you go one step further and take it to the police?" "Trying to talk yourself out of a job?" "Yes.

Even with tear gas, tommy guns and a police cordon, there is no way to take a desperate man without risking your life.

Her eyes, dark brown and experienced, carried a little luggage underneath.