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842f7bb
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The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have
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writing
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Raymond Chandler |
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12a45e9
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You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.
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inspirational
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Raymond Chandler |
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70e111f
|
That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.
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Raymond Chandler |
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2545e67
|
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
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Raymond Chandler |
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4a01d92
|
Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
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marlowe
raymond-chandler
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Raymond Chandler |
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8bd2a2a
|
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." ( )"
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writing
detachment
critics
insight
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Raymond Chandler |
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25e3816
|
And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.
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Raymond Chandler |
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9142389
|
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old..
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Raymond Chandler |
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5e6bfef
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Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?" "It takes about three years." "Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well."
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Raymond Chandler |
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f03522e
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He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.
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Raymond Chandler |
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b2587ce
|
It's a swell theory," I said. "Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush."
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Raymond Chandler |
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93f97fd
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I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
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Raymond Chandler |
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3b74210
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I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission." "I get it," I said. "I'm stupid. It sank in after a while."
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Raymond Chandler |
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0d7cce7
|
I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish."
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olympia
marlowe
raymond-chandler
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Raymond Chandler |
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e7ec1ef
|
That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.
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Raymond Chandler |
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877e056
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On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.
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Raymond Chandler |
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15c5eb2
|
Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds. A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.
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Raymond Chandler |
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224e168
|
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
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Raymond Chandler |
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0cd33bd
|
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)
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love
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Raymond Chandler |
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cb4de22
|
But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard--well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.
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mystery-novels
thriller
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Raymond Chandler |
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6d4e7ed
|
The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut. I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.
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rain
smoking
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Raymond Chandler |
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94ddf39
|
She sighed. "All men are the same." "So are all women--after the first nine."
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Raymond Chandler |
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1a09101
|
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
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Raymond Chandler |
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8eb9762
|
His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.
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humor
new-york-city
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Raymond Chandler |
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f4066ab
|
Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten--when Larry Cobb was sober.
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Raymond Chandler |
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76f81bb
|
I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.
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Raymond Chandler |
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41413dd
|
Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the..
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Raymond Chandler |
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98f3721
|
I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.
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Raymond Chandler |
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3eea57d
|
She'd make for a jazzy week-end, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.
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Raymond Chandler |
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ac11130
|
They just sat there looking back at me. The orange queen was clacking her typewriter. Cop talk was no more treat for her than legs to a dance director. They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and grey like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from k..
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Raymond Chandler |
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f240436
|
Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character.
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Raymond Chandler |
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c6e40c1
|
I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I didn't even see him at first. The buzzing stopped an..
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Raymond Chandler |
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7505726
|
There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.
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Raymond Chandler |
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2662a37
|
I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me--and I didn't think it would--nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.
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Raymond Chandler |
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e1d5d85
|
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
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Raymond Chandler |
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e3cc388
|
I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
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Raymond Chandler |
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aee8537
|
I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.
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memories
past
carmen-sternwood
chessmen
old-letters
pictures
the-hobart-arms
so-noir-it-hurts
philip-marlowe
home
radio
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Raymond Chandler |
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bbbfe8c
|
Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
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tragedy
time
youth
beauty
death
shabby
wrinkled
grow
mean
old
young
die
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Raymond Chandler |
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7d3f9bb
|
All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
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Raymond Chandler |
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19f5aa1
|
Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.
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Raymond Chandler |
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f6e3709
|
Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram.
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Raymond Chandler |
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d7becdb
|
Pero siempre me gustan los libros equivocados. Y las peliculas equivocadas. Y la gente equivocada.
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Raymond Chandler |
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a0237cf
|
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.
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Raymond Chandler |
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91caae0
|
He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read.
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Raymond Chandler |