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Top Ross Macdonald Quotes

Browse top 39 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ross Macdonald.

Favorite Ross Macdonald Quotes

1. "A cockroach stepped out from behind the ketchup, gave me a quick impassive once-over, decided that I was of the Brahmin faith, and walked earnestly across the table on errands of his own. Somebody had left a newspaper on the bench beside me, and I picked it up and swatted the cockroach, permitting his soul to transmigrate into the body of a quartermaster." ~ Ross Macdonald
2. "The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution." ~ Ross Macdonald
3. "As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married." ~ Ross Macdonald
4. "I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves." ~ Ross Macdonald
5. "Money costs too much." ~ Ross Macdonald
6. "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." ~ Ross Macdonald
7. "Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again." ~ Ross Macdonald
8. "How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?" ~ Ross Macdonald
9. "I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it." ~ Ross Macdonald
10. "My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me." ~ Ross Macdonald
11. "The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness." ~ Ross Macdonald
12. "The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure." ~ Ross Macdonald
13. "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." ~ Ross Macdonald
14. "The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters." ~ Ross Macdonald
15. "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." ~ Ross Macdonald
16. "It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind." ~ Ross Macdonald
17. "She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to." ~ Ross Macdonald
18. "No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly." ~ Ross Macdonald
19. "He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage." ~ Ross Macdonald
20. "I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I'm not going to lose it." ~ Ross Macdonald
21. "All you men still have the Victorian hangover. I suppose you think woman's place is in the home, too?" "Not my home." ~ Ross Macdonald
22. "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." ~ Ross Macdonald
23. "No more guns for you." ~ Ross Macdonald
24. "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people." ~ Ross Macdonald
25. "In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs." ~ Ross Macdonald
26. "Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms." ~ Ross Macdonald
27. "Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces." ~ Ross Macdonald
28. "The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present." ~ Ross Macdonald
29. "I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters." ~ Ross Macdonald
30. "as if by behaving modestly and discreetly they could make the fire stay up on the mountain and die there, like an unwanted god." ~ Ross Macdonald
31. "The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers." ~ Ross Macdonald
32. "...a thin woman about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet." ~ Ross Macdonald
33. "I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter." ~ Ross Macdonald
34. "The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.The Drowning Pool" ~ Ross Macdonald
35. "Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east." ~ Ross Macdonald
36. "We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff." ~ Ross Macdonald
37. "I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves." ~ Ross Macdonald
38. "I like the sun.""Do you really? I didn't think you'd go in for simple things like sun. You're the neon type, aren't you?""If you say so." ~ Ross Macdonald
39. "Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born." ~ Ross Macdonald

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Ross Macdonald Quotes
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Today's Quote

Nessuno può liberarsi della Paura se non osa vedere il suo posto nel mondo così com'è; nessuno può toccare la grandezza di cui pur è capace se prima non ha la forza di vedere la sua piccolezza"
Author: Bertrand Russell

What Did Ross Macdonald Talk About?

Wit
Ear
King
Thin
Con
Per
Room
Hey
Here
Trouble
Looking
Behind
Lit
Use
Hen
Pen
Again
Sea
Novel
Son
Bee
Run
House

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