The tragedy of life, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
We were very much in love – the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.
There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.
I’m a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn’t gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.
She came back with the glass and her fingers, cold from holding the glass, touched mine, and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly, as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and you have been in an enchanted valley.
She was a cute as a washtub.
Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case... He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions.
It was a nice walk, if you like grunting.
My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.
They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don’t find out they don’t know themselves.
A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.
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.