Raymond Chandler quotes - page 5

The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. (Raymond Chandler)
He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of. View quote
Raymond Chandler
You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. "Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. 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 was ever intended to be. View quote
Raymond Chandler
"Who is this Hemingway person at all?” "A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.” "That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said. View quote
Raymond Chandler
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them. View quote
Raymond Chandler
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked. View quote
Raymond Chandler
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 was ever intended to be. View quote
Raymond Chandler
A really good detective never gets married. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations. (Raymond Chandler)
It is not a fragrant world. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it. View quote
Raymond Chandler
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I certainly admire people who do things. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday. View quote
Raymond Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication. (Raymond Chandler)
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture. View quote
Raymond Chandler
To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips. (...) Just another four-flusher. View quote
Raymond Chandler
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. View quote
Raymond Chandler