Ross Macdonald

Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth.

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.

"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"

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

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

Money costs too much.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns — different states, if possible — and write each other letters once a year.

We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose.

When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables.

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted.

Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.