Ross Macdonald

Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983), who wrote under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, was an American-Canadian writer of mystery fiction and detective fiction.

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

• An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

• The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

• 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.

• 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.

• "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."

• Money costs too much.

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

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

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

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

• We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose.
• There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns — different states, if possible — and write each other letters once a year.

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Ross Macdonald