124 Quotes by Ross Macdonald

The waves came up towards us, fumbling and gnawing at the beach like an immense soft mouth.

I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.

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.

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

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.

The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight.

There are only two kinds of police systems, Sanford, when you look at it hysterically. 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 house belonged to the hashish school of Spanish architecture. Probably early nineteen-twenties and imitation Mizener, which made it the imitation of an imitation which wasn't worth imitating. It was a ponderous monstrosity with thick walls, meager windows, insane turrets. Somebody with a hidalgo complex had tried to jail a dream of happiness. The prisoner had probably died, or lost its mind.