Quotes About Introspection

You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

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

She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.

Ich blickte den Revolver an, und der Revolver blickte mich an.

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

I didn't say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you're not thinking.

This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.

He would be like that for the rest of his life and that is what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.

I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.

I was way past the age when it's fun to swear at people you can't hurt.

He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.

I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.

Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn't like it.

I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

We had quite a fight.' 'You mean you had – and mostly with yourself.

She didn't even look towards me as I went out. I went out into the crisp fall sunlight and got into my car. I was a nice boy, trying to get along. Yes, I was a swell guy. I liked knowing myself. I was the kind of guy who chiseled a sodden old wreck out of her life secrets to win a ten-dollar bet.

poisoned myself with cigarette smoke

I looked at my watch, put my pipe in an ashtray, and then had to look at my watch again to see what time it was

Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.

bottle of rye out

You must define yourself, for no one else has the wisdom to do it for you.

It takes a man of unusual character to openly confront his own shortcomings. It's so much more convenient to blame others.