Raymond Chandler Quotes

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, – for someone to play against himself is absurd…

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge… And I cannot escape! I am alone!

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

I called him my alibi. And he called me his incense.

Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.

The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.

She was the kind of woman that made you want to drop to your knees and thank God you were a man.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

Man is not reconciled to the endlessly repeated game of chess that life is.

I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.

I’m just a guy who likes to drink with the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the tall and the short, the young and the old, the skinny and the fat, the beautiful and the ugly, the sweet and the bitter.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts talking business.

I think he really, sincerely wanted to kill me. And I think he would have done it sooner or later, if I hadn’t thought of something stupider than anything he ever thought of.

Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen. That’s the last sensation I had before I blacked out; that thick smell of asphalt. She said she’d fix my bike. Free.

What killed him? Tobacco and whisky, of course. What would you expect the man who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish to die from?

I couldn’t handle him sober. He was just an unshaven little man in a $35 suit.

Blackmail doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t know what it does sit well with.

Ever seen a man take a bullet? That takes a man.

I’d have to be a pretty tall worm to get on your hook.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, or what he did with his life.

I felt like an empty house somebody had forgotten to burn down. I felt like somebody that had been left out in the sun too long.

What a man does in the privacy of his own goldfish bowl is one thing for which he is alone responsible.

They pay from fifty to a hundred bucks a day to anybody who can keep the place from running away while they try to find somebody really crooked to take hold.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.

There was a tarnished light in his eyes that meant he didn’t care if he lived or died. It was all the same to him.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

There was a bloody meat cleaver on a counter beside her and a pan full of burnt potatoes on a stove.

There are no chatty, witty or profound quotes that could be attributed to me since my death.

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

Hell is just around the corner and I got a good look at it.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

She sat in front of me and lit a cigarette with a hand that trembled so she had to use both hands to get the cigarette into her mouth.

She leaned over the table to me, and when she spoke, the words came as slowly and distinctly as if she were lighting them off a match one by one, and that’s enough to make anybody a good listener.

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