Raymond Chandler Quotes

“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...”

“You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor.”

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

“For people with money you and your sister don’t seem to have much fun.”

“The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn’t move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.”

“He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means.”

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

“Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has anymore moral sense than a cat. Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had...”

“He’s got friends in town, or he wouldn’t be what he is.”

“Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.”

“Once outside the law you’re all the way outside.”

“I have my pipe line into headquarters, or I wouldn’t be here. I get them the way they happen, not the way you read them in the papers.”

“I was wearing my powder-blue suit... I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

“I was playing for time. Just for time. I played the wrong way, of course.”

“I’m a copper ... as honest as you could expect ... in a world where it’s going out of style.”

“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights...”

“He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.”

“About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door.”

“The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming down to Las Olindas that evening to talk to him. That was how smart I was.”

“His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.”