He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He’s going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he’s apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.
Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.
I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction.
A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn’t hear too well what it said, partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down.
I bet she snaps a mean garter.
I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn’t like, but that’s what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt.
Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
It’s a sordid life, but I’m used to it.
The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.
I didn’t have anything really exiting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger breath.
A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
It’s like this with us baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts... nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me.
There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.
No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront.
Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.
Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.
What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.
We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return.