Quotes from Raymond Chandler

Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

A doorman opened the door for me and I went in. The lobby was not quite as big as the Yankee Stadium. It was floored with a pale blue carpet with sponge rubber underneath. It was so soft it made me want to lie down and roll.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again.

The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.

Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.

They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don't find out they don't know themselves.

A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction.

A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You'd hate to be me

If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat — just to see what ran out of it.

There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish.

You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you're no rat to me.

I bet she snaps a mean garter.

I'm a lone wolf, unmarried…and not rich….I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers and sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens…nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

It's a sordid life, but I'm used to it.

I did it for you. I took in a pint of bourbon with me. She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all.

So you shoot people, she said quietly. You're a killer. Me? How? The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read. Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them. She didn't say anything. I didn't have to, I said. I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at. That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops. Oh, nuts.

The kid said: "I don't like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don't like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don't like them in the first place.