Ross Macdonald Quotes

Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth.

You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"
"I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.

Money costs too much.

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables.

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

We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose.

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

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.