Quotes from Ross MacDonald

Los muertos no hacen daño. Los vivos son quienes nos lastiman.

Anton was in his office, short and wide behind the desk in a gabardine suit the color of lemon ice cream. His face was sunlamp brown.

I've taken an option on it, but I haven't bought it yet

You're making this up" "I am not" "What woods are you talking about" "It's on the peninsula someplace. I didnt pay good attention on the way. I was strung out on an Einstein trip." "Einstein Trip" When you go all the way out, past the last star, and space loops back on you.

Why wasn't he arrested?" "He was, but they couldn't convict him. Don't ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians.

The city started sooner than I expected it to. In ten years it had crawled out along the highway, covering new farms with the concrete squares of suburban developments. 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.

Miss Seeley came in.... She was a little older, a little thinner. Her tailored pinstriped suit emphasized the boniness of her figure. But she still wore hopeful white ruffles at her wrists and throat.

You're making this up" "I am not" "What woods are you talking about" "It's on the peninsula someplace. I didnt pay good attention on the way. I was strung out on an Einstein trip." "Einstein Trip?" "When you go all the way out, past the last star, and space loops back on you.

There are only two kinds of police systems, Sanford, when you look at it historically. The kind that exists to uphold the law and to treat everybody equally under the law, and the kind that exists to serve private interest. Your idea of a useful police force is the second kind—a police force that will lay off your friends and bear down hard on your enemies, a force of strikebreakers and bully boys, a Swiss Guard for the elite.

The trouble is that corruption isn't something you can have a little of. It's like cancer; inject it into a political organism and it's bound to spread. It's almost an axiom that power that has been taken out of the hands of the people is bound to grow progressively more corrupt.

I retreated up the highway to a drive-in where I ate a torpedo sandwich.

I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing.

As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.