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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“He held my gun in his delicate, lovely hand. He held it pointed at my chest.

'I could teach you,' he said in his soft voice. 'But to what purpose? A dirty little man in a dirty little world. One spot of brightness on you and you would still be that. Is it not so?' He smiled, so beautifully.

I swung at his smile with everything I had left.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Limited no longer by his own capacities, he had an odds advantage that he had never had as a competitor. He knew he could last. But his fighters were less dependable. Some trained one day and laid off two, fought once and quit, lost their timing, came back, struggled into condition, gasped and missed and were beaten, or won several bouts and got married, or moved, or were drafted, joined the navy or went to jail, were bleeders, suffered headaches, saw double or broke their hands.”
― Leonard Gardner, Fat City

“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

“He held my gun in his delicate, lovely hand. He held it pointed at my chest.
'I could teach you,' he said in his soft voice. 'But to what purpose? A dirty little man in a dirty little world. One spot of brightness on you and you would still be that. Is it not so?' He smiled, so beautifully.
I swung at his smile with everything I had left.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

“It’s a nice town.’ She said sharply, a little breathlessly. ‘You can’t judge-‘

‘Okey, it’s a nice town. So is Chicago. You could live there a long time and not see a Tommy-gun. Sure, it’s a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference. And that makes me want out.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Telegram@bestsupplies1 Buy Cocaine online in Coventry”
― Marcus Sakey, Killer Year: A Criminal Anthology

“Days were like long twilights in the house under the black walnut trees; through untrimmed shrubs screening the windows the sun scarcely shone. It was a low, white frame house with a sagging porch roof supported by two chains that through years of stress had cracked the overhang of the main roof where they were attached, pulling it downward at so noticeable an angle that everything—overhang, chains, porch roof—appeared checked from collapsing by nothing more than the tar paper over the cracked boards.”
― Leonard Gardner, Fat City