Lisa Schmeiser

“You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."

(A Qualified Farewell)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance

“When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique