Quotes from Raymond Chandler

You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. (I'll Be Waiting)

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little wile I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

I was meeting the spitting boys today.

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.

Grenz picked up a ruler and sighted along it, a meaningless gesture which kept him from looking at me.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law ever was ever intended to be.

drank a little more of the tequila and made a face. "Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?

Trouble is my business," I said. "How else would I make a nickel?

Her voice became an icy drawl. Take me away from here, if you will be so kind. I'm quite sure I'd like to go home. You won't be a sister to me? If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat Ã¢â'¬â€ just to see what ran out of it.

La primera sensación fue que, si alguien me reñía, yo me echaría a llorar. La segunda, que la habitación era demasiado pequeña para mi cabeza. Sentía la frente muy lejos de la nuca, y los lados enormemente distantes el uno del otro, a pesar de lo cual un sordo latido pasaba de una sien a otra. Las distancias no significan nada hoy en día.

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems.

What do you do when you get mad—dance a tango with a ground squirrel?

I never drink on duty, she said coldly. Besides somebody might smell my breath. You're working for me now. All my employees are required to get liquored up from time to time. Besides, if you had a good dinner and were to eat a couple of the Chasers in the kitchen cabinet, nobody would smell your breath.

Why, I'll be a monkey's uncle. I'll be a snake's daddy. I'll be a mickey finn at a woman's-club lunch.

Her hand was small and had shape, not the usual bony garden tool you see on women nowadays.

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.

Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?' 'It takes about three years.' 'Three years?' He looked shocked. 'Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colours, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.

Diálogo cínico não é humor espirituoso.

If I'm wrong, you can prove it on me and I'll eat my chair cushion.

The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.

On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers.

His office had the musty smell of years of routine.