Ross Macdonald

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

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

“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.”

“No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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