“I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“I’ve spilled all my secrets. How do you make people do it?” “I don’t. People like to talk about what’s hurting them. It takes the edge off the pain sometimes.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“What did the old man want?” “Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.” “But not you, eh?” Her voice was sardonic. “Not me,” I said. “Money costs too much.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“daughter?’ ‘She was a beautiful child.’ Mrs Williams’s eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“That isn’t your real motivation. I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don’t you admit it?” “I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
“I’m sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.’ I”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Goodbye Look
Ross Macdonald
Born place: in Los Gatos, California,, The United States
Born date December 13, 1915
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“Sweet pea, you are my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye, and I don't want to go a day without you. Consider that your official invitation”
― Gena Showalter, quote from A Mad Zombie Party
“Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could
come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The
dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a
sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their
sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the
plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this
earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt
to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of
falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a
jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a
germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts
and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten,
sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy - cruelty . . . Oh, I don't
know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood
was shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began to
be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was
against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed.
They came to know shame, and shame brought them to
virtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every union
began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and
the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became
hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for
isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began
to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with
sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said
that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then
science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking
of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those
ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and
drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to
ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly
remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that
they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed
at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a
dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and
shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost
all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so
longed to be happy and innocent once more that they
succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set
up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire;
though at the same time they fully believed that it was
unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down
to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have
happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy
condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it
to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go
back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered
me:
"We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and
weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish
ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will
judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have
science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we
shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than
feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science
will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the
knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than
happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Here on Earth
“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from In the Lake of the Woods
“I wonder if all women secretly fantasize, like me, about what it would be like to be an extraordinary beauty and bitchy as you wanna be.”
― Lori Lansens, quote from The Girls
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