Quotes from Dashiell Hammett

Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us - deader'n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching 'em up now. I guess he wishes he'd stayed and talked to us.

But besides I haven't the time: I'm too busy trying to see that you don't lose any of the money I married you for." I kissed her.

It was a good trick, only it didn't work. In

He's cute, I said. Uh-huh, the grey man agreed, and so's dynamite.

Quinn came over to refill his glass. He looked towards the bedroom door. Where'd you find the little blonde? Used to bounce it on my knee. Which knew? he asked. Could I touch it?

I was two pavements from my destination when somebodey S-s-s-s-s'd at me. I probably didn't jump twenty feet.

My side felt a lot better when Nora called me at noon the next day. My nice policeman wants to see you, she said. How do you feel? Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober. I pushed Asta out of the way and got up.

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home. I thought you'd gone to live with her, she said. You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck. Piece of duck or puzzle?...

Dorothy wants to talk to you. Don't ask her to eat with us. When Nora returned from the telephone she had a look in her eye. Now what's up? I asked. Nothing. Just 'how are you' and all that. I said: if you're lying to the old man, God'll punish you.

If a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

She tilted her head to the right. You didn't even tell me you had taken the case. I had done what? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I hadn't and haven't. My getting shot ought to prove I was an innocent bystander. Does it hurt much? It itches. I forgot to have the dressing changed this afternoon. Wasn't Nora utterly terrified? So was I and so was the guy that shot me. There's Halsey. I haven't spoken to him yet.

Alice opened the door when I rang. She had on green pyjamas and held a hairbrush in one hand. She looked wearily at Quinn and spoke wearily: Bring it in. I took it in and spread it on a bed. It mumbled something I could not make out and moved one hand feebly back and forth, but its eyes stayed shut.

Dorothy asked timidly: Did his wife say anything? She sent her love to you. Nora said: Stop being nasty.

The man whose name I had not caught was saying: "Comes the revolution and we'll all be lined up against the wall—first thing." He seemed to think it was a good idea.

Are you asleep?" I said I was. She lit a cigarette for me, one for herself. "Don't you ever think you'd like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it?

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

You might as well take your punishment and get it over with

To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take the lid off life and let [you] look at the works.

Gilbert put down the magazine he was looking at and politely said he hoped I was recovering from my injury. I said I was. I've never been hurt, really hurt, he went on, that I can remember. I've tried hurting myself, of course, but that's not the same thing. It just made me uncomfortable and irritable and sweat a lot. That's pretty much the same thing, I said.

He's the guy that the joke was wrote about: 'Is he a criminal lawyer?' 'Yes, very.

It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat- she perched on things - and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it,...

What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?

Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there'd be no sense to it. That's the fix I am in. I don't know anything else, don't enjoy anything else, don't want to know or enjoy anything else. You can't weight that against any sum of money. Money's good stuff. I haven't anything against it.

You're good. You're very good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.