Tag: quotes

439 posts since July 2010 RSS

  • October 19th, 2015 1:04pm

    It is like a sudden scream in the night, but there is no sound. Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it has happened to me also in broad daylight ― that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing. Unless out of the long years and the long tensions, and in the present case, the abrupt certainty that what bullfighters call “the moment of truth” is here.

    — Playback by Raymond Chandler.

  • September 15th, 2015 2:30am

    The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn’t take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won’t get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.

    — Raymond Chandler (via writingquotes)

  • September 14th, 2015 12:39am

    Nothing with you in it stinks for me, Miss Gonzales.“

    She stood away from the door and waved me in. "We will have a drink,” she said. “The God-damnest drink we will have. I adore flattery, however dishonest.”

    I went in. A gun in the kidney wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. She stood so that I had to practically push her mammaries out of the way to get through the door. She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

    —

    The Little Sister by

    Raymond Chandler.

  • August 26th, 2015 8:05pm

    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 having to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not having 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.

    — The High Window by Raymond Chandler.

  • August 16th, 2015 9:50pm

    No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.

    — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance (via fralites)

  • August 11th, 2015 1:11pm

    Consent is like boxing. If both people do not agree to it, then one person is committing a crime.

    — John Oliver, Last Week Tonight (08/09/2015)

  • August 11th, 2015 1:07pm

    Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”

    Sam Spade “You know, that’s good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we’d never get anywhere"

    — Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929)

  • August 11th, 2015 12:54pm

    What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

    — Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
    (via gwydderig)

  • August 4th, 2015 3:01pm

    I don’t see what there is to be so cagey about,“ she snapped. "And I don’t like your manners.”

    “I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.

    — The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.

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