“When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.”
The Long Goodbye (1954)
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Raymond Chandler 124
Novelist, screenwriter 1888–1959Related quotes

Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

“Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.”

then I came home – not sleepy so I made a pattern of some flowers I had picked – They were like waterlilies – white ones – with the quality of smoothness gone.
Canyon, Texas, (September 14, 1916), pp. 186, 187
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Quote from Friedrich's Diary-note, 1803; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich - Bekenntnisse, pp. 72-73; translated and quoted by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 45
1794 - 1840

Laura Furman, Rumours Exposed http://books.google.com/books?id=SW31aVVDc_AC (2003: Citadel Press), ISBN 9780806524726, p. 75