Raymond Chandler: Trending quotes

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Raymond Chandler: 248 quotes14 likes

“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely

“She had eyes like strange sins.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window

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

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), Chapter 28
Context: I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

“The more you reason the less you create.”

Raymond Chandler

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

“Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.”

Raymond Chandler

Source: Trouble Is My Business

“If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive.
If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.”

Raymond Chandler book Playback

Source: Playback

“She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), Chapter 28, Phillip Marlowe watching Mona "Silver-Wig" Mars

“It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely

“California, the department store state.”

Raymond Chandler

“Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep

“I'm killing time and it's dying hard.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

Variant: Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.
Source: The Long Goodbye

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

Raymond Chandler

In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
Context: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

“The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

Raymond Chandler

Source: Selected Letters

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

Raymond Chandler

“She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.”

Raymond Chandler book The Lady in the Lake

Source: The Lady in the Lake (1943), chapter 1
Context: The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)