Ross MacDonald

Novelist

1965-01-27

Quotes by Ross MacDonald

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

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

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• 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.

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

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

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

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

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

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• 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.

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• As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.

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• The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

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• 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.

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