Hard Boiled Quotes

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas 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.”
― Raymond Chandler, Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories

“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“I'm not a young man. I'm old, tired and full of no coffee.”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“...the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.”
― Lawrence Block, A Dance At The Slaughterhouse

“I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.”
― Lawrence Block, Grifter's Game

“The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“I wouldn't say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.”
― Ed McBain

“The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said, partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“Common sense says go home and forget it, no money coming in. Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word. I helped her off with her raincoat. She smelled very nice. She had a pair of legs - so far as I could determine - that were not painful to look at. She wore night sheer stockings. I stared at them rather intently, especially when she crossed her legs and held out a cigarette to be lighted”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“The car slid along Los Angeles to Fifth, east to San Pedro, south again for block after block, quiet blocks and loud blocks, blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wise-cracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drug-stores and beer parlors full of slot machines. (Pickup on Noon Street)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You'd hate to be me”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.”

“I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“Being in the cell was a bit like being in a casino, with no clocks and no change in the lighting. But he had more to lose than a bet, and no one was bringing him cocktails.”
― Hieronymus Hawkes, Effacement

“HE FELL DOWN HARD—stone-cold dead, next to my feet. It didn’t take much—just a pull of the trigger. The way I figured; a bullet always had its way of settling things. It asked no questions. Just did what it was told. And I hadn’t planned on resolving my disagreement with the Thin Man that way. But he left me no choice. He pulled his Luger, deciding that one of his .28s was the only way to resolve the issue. Trouble was, he missed. But a .22 from my Colt didn’t.”
― Oliver Dean Spencer, The Case of the Runaway Orangutan

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“He's a man who didn't hear the twig snap.”
― Richard Stark, Butcher's Moon

“If we could avenge people for their personalities, we'd all be in trouble.”
― Ivy Pochoda, Sing Her Down