Michael

“So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load a grief, and a small piece of money.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Gore cinema is not liberating (though the kids who flocked to the theaters may think otherwise), but suffocating, the work of cynical adults having a go at the vulnerability of children.”
― David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world that would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“If there remains any overriding idea it is that ideas are a problem. If there is any remaining commonly held value judgement it is that value judgements are wrong. If there remains any remaining certainty it is a distrust of certainty. And if this does not add up to a philosophy it certainly adds up to an attitude: shallow, unlikely to survive any sustained onslaught, but easy enough to adopt.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam