Quotes About Deception

Our supermarkets sell us horsemeat as beef, our politicians fiddle their expenses, and our bankers risk money that isn't theirs. So it's not surprising the public don't trust anyone or anything.

Satan would have you believe that happiness comes only as you surrender to his enticements, but one only needs to look at the shattered lives of those who violate God's laws to know why Satan is called the Father of Lies.

So much water so close to home.

She had eyes like strange sins.

We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.

It's a swell theory, I said. Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.

Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.

She'd make for a jazzy week-end, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.

It could have been a beautiful friendship," Beifus said with a sigh. "Except for the ice pick, of course.

Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else.

The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.

I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn't like, but that's what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt.

You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures...

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

The butler went away among the abominable plants. The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.

Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse.

Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow)

Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.

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.

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.

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)

Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them.