124 Quotes by Ross Macdonald

He wouldn’t look at me. He stood against the wall, trying to merge with the wall.

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.

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.

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.

Mrs. Gley came down in a rush. She had on a kind of tea gown whose draperies flew out behind her, like the tail of a blowzy comet.

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.

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm.

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

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