Top 70 Ross Macdonald Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Ross Macdonald

3. “I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.”

— Ross Macdonald

4. “People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody’s living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn’t make too much sense, and it isn’t working too well.”

— Ross Macdonald

5. “Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.”

— Ross Macdonald

6. “There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn’t be, arson committed by children playing with matches. I.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

8. “You’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes and sell his body for soap.”

— Ross Macdonald

9. “An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.”

— Ross Macdonald

10. “I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.”

— Ross Macdonald

11. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

12. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

13. “If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It’s the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.”

— Ross Macdonald

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.”

— Ross Macdonald

17. “A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops.”

— Ross Macdonald

18. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

19. “The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

— Ross Macdonald

20. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

21. “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

22. “Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there’s no way to hang up.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

24. “What did the old man want?” “Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.” “But not you, eh?” Her voice was sardonic. “Not me,” I said. “Money costs too much.”

— Ross Macdonald

25. “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

26. “When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.”

— Ross Macdonald

27. “He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.”

— Ross Macdonald

28. “She walked as she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt.”

— Ross Macdonald

29. “It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee- and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she’d brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand.”

— Ross Macdonald

30. “The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.”

— Ross Macdonald

31. “The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.”

— Ross Macdonald

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

— Ross Macdonald

33. “I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for.”

— Ross Macdonald

34. “There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns – different states, if possible – and write each other letters once a year.”

— Ross Macdonald

35. “Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.”

— Ross Macdonald

36. “The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.”

— Ross Macdonald

37. “We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you’re always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint.”

— Ross Macdonald

38. “I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.”

— Ross Macdonald

39. “The apparent facts, if you like. I’m not a philosopher. We lawyers don’t deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances.”

— Ross Macdonald

40. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

41. “At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy.”

— Ross Macdonald

42. “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.”

— Ross Macdonald

43. “She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object.”

— Ross Macdonald

44. “We had reached the foot of Sable’s hill. Howell wrestled his car up the climbing curves. The tires shuddered and screeched like lost souls under punishment.”

— Ross Macdonald

45. “It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.”

— Ross Macdonald

46. “His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people’s power.”

— Ross Macdonald

47. “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

48. “She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness.”

— Ross Macdonald

49. “What brings you up to the City?” he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there’s only one city.”

— Ross Macdonald

50. “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