Ross Macdonald

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.

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.

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour.

Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.

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.

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.

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.