Quotes from Dashiell Hammett

I suppose you'll see her. You'll be disappointed at first. Then without being able to say how or when it happened, you'll find you've forgotten your disappointment, and the first thing you know you'll be telling her your life's history, and all your troubles and hopes.

Cairo: You have always, i must say, a smooth explanation ready. Spade: What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?

A woman stood between them holding a sizzling skillet in her hand. She was a big-boned, full-fleshed, red-haired woman of perhaps twenty-eight, handsome in a rather brutal, sloppy way.

What was her fearsome secret?" I told her what Dorothy had told me. "It sounds like a lot of hooey." "Why?" "Why not? Everything else we've got from them has been hooey.

Presently she said: "It's none of my business, Nick, but what do people think of me?" "You're like everybody else: some people like you, some people don't, and some have no feeling about it one way or the other.

His eyes burned yellowly.

I don't like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn't like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn't like you." She

I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more...

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second "you." "People lose teeth talking like that." Spade's voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. "If you want to hang around you'll be polite." The boy repeated his two words.

guess I can put two and two together." "Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two.

Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet.

anybody who started hunting for evidence of insanity in himself would certainly find plenty ? Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse, ch 20

She jealous?" I asked before he could go on with his shouting. "And if you don't yell maybe I'll be able to hear you anyway. My deafness is a lot better since I've been eating yeast.

We believed your two hundred dollars.

Sam Spade: You're a good man, sister.

Sam Spade: When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it.

Men have thought me beautiful and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me, and doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don't know, and he acts as if i were a hag - an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that.

Plans are all right sometimes, I said. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right--if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top.

It's a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn't like me.

I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and of a gray shade that wasn't altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to. The Girl With The Silver Eyes

Margaret's throat had some swollen thing in it. Fog blurred everything but the charging red face. An unvoiced whimper shook her breast. She wanted to run to him as to a lover. She wanted to run from him as from a ravisher. She stood very still in her doorway, smiling demurely with dry, hot mouth.

I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does.

You're never satisfied until you've got two buts and an if attached to everything.

Just you, darling. Lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.