





Photo credit: UCLA Special Collections

Quotes from Raymond Chandler's writing In my humble opinion, this is the best short story beginning ever, perhaps the best opening in all literature. "There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana's that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge." Red Wind (Opening paragraph) ---- "Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles. In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander. Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them" The High Window ---- The light went out. The room was as black as Carry Nation's bonnet. Farewell My Lovely ---- "Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust." "Who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain. "A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir." The BIg Sleep ---- "Sit down, pal. Breathe quietly, keep your voice down, and remember that a Carne operative is to a cheap shamus like you what Toscanini is to an organ grinder's monkey." The Long Goodbye ----

"She shot him." His stiff eyebrows went up a little. His eyes got the stony look. His teeth clamped. He breathed softly and twisted one large hand on his knee and looked down at it.

"Go on," he said, in a voice the size of a marble." Short story "The Lady In The Lake" ---- "On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis" "Playback" (Chapter 8) ---- "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 8) ---- "She's dark and lovely and passionate. And very, very kind." "And exclusive as a mailbox," I said. "The Little Sister" (Chapter 19) ---- "It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way--but not as far as Velma had gone" "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 41) ---- "I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn't want to eat. I didn't even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday's calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket" "The Little Sister" (Chapter 25) ---- "Eddie Mars wanted to see me." "I didn't know you knew him. Why?" "I don't mind telling you. He thought I was looking for somebody he thought had run away with his wife." "Were you?" "No." "Then what did you come for?"" "To find out why he thought I was looking for somebody he thought had run away with his wife." "Did you find out?" "No." "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 23) ---- "Tall, aren't you?" she said." "I didn't mean to be." "Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her." "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 1) ---- "I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." "The Long Goodbye" (Chapter 52) ---- "Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and 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." "The High Window" (Chapter 15) ---- "The minutes went by on tip toe, with their fingers to their lips." "The Lady in the Lake" (Chapter 1) ---- "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight." "The Little Sister" (Chapter 12) ---- "I'm an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard." "The King in Yellow" ---- "The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 9) ---- "Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy." "The Long Good-bye" (Chapter 29) ---- "Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn't move more that one eyelash." "Red Wind" (Section 5) ---- "To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her.It would have stopped a runaway horse." "The Little Sister" ---- "I felt like an amputated leg." "Trouble Is My Business" (Section 4) ---- "The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives" "The Little Siste"r (Chapter 9) ---- "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket" "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 18) ---- "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." "The Simple Art of Murder" (essay) ---- "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." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 34) ---- "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 1) ---- "San Diego? One of the most beautiful harbors in the world and nothing in it but navy and a few fishing boats. At night it is fairyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns. But Marlowe has to get home and count the spoons." "The Long Goodbye" (Chapter 6) ---- "She's a charming middle age lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she's washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 6) ---- "A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman." "The Long Goodbye" (Chapter 12) ---- "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings." "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 2) ---- "His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish." "The Man Who Liked Dogs" ---- "I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split." "The Long Good-bye" (Chapter 13) ---- "Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 1) ---- "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. Me, I was part of the nastiness now." "The Big Sleep" (Chapter 32) ---- "Her smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman's ball." "High Window" (Chapter 3) ---- "At three A.M. I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it." "The Long Good-bye" (Chapter 12) ---- "She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed." "The Long Good-bye" (Chapter 13) ---- "The walls here are as thin as a hoofer's wallet." "Playback" (Chapter 5) ---- "The voice got as cool as a cafeteria dinner." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 15) ---- "The kid's face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color." "Red Wind" ---- "If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will." Chandler's notebooks ---- "One time in Leavenworth, just one time in all those years, Wally Sype wrapped himself around a can of white shellac and got as tight as a fat lady's girdle." "Goldfish" ---- "Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde." "Spanish Blood" ---- "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 High Window" (Chapter 5) ---- "You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls . . . how in the world do you do it?" "The High Window" (Chapter 23) ---- "She was as cute as a washtub." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 5) ---- "The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. I sneaked over to the side entrance and pressed a bell and somewhere a set of chimes made a deep mellow sound like church bells. A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 18) ---- "I sat beside her on the yellow leather chesterfield. 'Aren't you a pretty fast worker?' she asked quietly. I didn't answer her. 'Do you do much of this sort of thing?' she asked with a sidelong look. 'Practically none. I'm a Tibetan monk, in my spare time.' 'Only you don't have any spare time." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 18) ---- "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." "Farewell, My Lovely" (Chapter 13) ---- "I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest." "Trouble Is My Business" (Section 2) ---- "If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come."

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"Hollywood has all the personality of a paper cup."

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You can find more quotes on the web. © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Loren Latker Home Close Window