Deb Wakefield

“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

“Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister