And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.
You can’t have everything, even in California.
I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.
Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always someone else’s money he’s adding up.
Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment.” – on Hollywood.
I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.” “I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.
She sighed. “All men are the same.” “So are all women – after the first nine.
However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.
Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.
The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building.
Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.
It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.
She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it.
After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screens and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.
Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else.
A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe... Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with same legend which is not locked. Come on in – there’s nobody here but me an a big bluebottle fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.
Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.