Here are the lines that I liked best from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Good-Bye:

“… as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore.”

“What I’d tell him you could fold into a blade of grass.”

“He read it carefully, the way lawyers read everything.”

“For two people in a hundred [marriage] is wonderful. The rest just work at it. After twenty years all the guy has left is a work bench in the garage.”

“‘In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.’ Does that suggest anything to you, sir? ‘Yeah — it suggests to me that the guy didn’t know very much about women.’”

“… like a cat teasing a half-dead mouse, trying to get it to run away just once more.”

“… as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.”

“I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.”

“I’m just sitting here waiting for a soft buck to rub itself against my cheek.”

“… the sandwich was as full of rich flavour as a piece torn off an old shirt.”

“He looked very excited — about as excited as a mortician at a cheap funeral.”

“[He] looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion.”

“I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy spoon joint.”

“… there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout.”

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars.”

“… as calm as a custard.”

“The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.”

“He had a grip like a pipe wrench.”

“He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle.”

“… she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy.”

“… as sympathetic as Georgia chain gang guards.”

“Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

“… as motionless as a sleeping cat.”

“He had a face like a collapsed lung.”

“It was the same old cocktail party, everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life to a mug of the juice.”

“… as sweet as mountain lilac.”

“He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant.”

“He stared at me as unblinkingly as a fish in a tank.”

“He went down as if shot through the heart.”

“… wetter than a drowned kitten.”

“An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach.”

“I felt like a short length of chewed string.”

“He looked like a tubercular white rat.”

“Nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.”

“She had eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.”

“… the television commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.”

“Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake his grandmother out of a light doze.”

“I belonged there like a pearl onion on a banana split.”

“He had the two-by-six grin of the guy who never loses a sale.”

“She gave him a lovely smile and he looked as if he had shaken hands with God.”

“… as soft as a sidewalk.”

“He sat listening with that plastic smile that people wear when they are trying not to scream.”

“… a mouth like a fire-bucket.”

“… as rare as a fat postman.”

“He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.”

“They say lust makes a man old, but keeps a woman young. They say a lot of nonsense.”

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.”

“He was about as hard to see as the Dalai Lama.”

“He didn’t come to you for help. It would be like borrowing money from a whore.”

“… as thin as the gold on a week-end wedding ring.”

“… faster than a card sharp can stack a deck.”

“In my book you’re a nickel’s worth of nothing.”

“A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.”

“They’re all shapes and sizes when they come in here, but they all go out the same size — small. And the same shape — bent.”

“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.”

“I puffed at the cigarette. It was one of those things with filters in them. It tasted like a high fog strained through cotton wool.”

“I wouldn’t tell you the time by the clock on your own wall.”

“He gave me a stare that would have frozen a fresh-baked potato.”

“He looked at me as if I was a cigarette stub, or an empty chair.”

“… as bald as a brick.”

“He hooked me with a neat left and crossed it. Bells rang, but not for dinner.”

“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”

“Some people you have to crowd and keep off balance. Some people you just box and they will end up beating themselves.”

“Drunks with money are just heavy drinkers.”

“Mostly I just kill time, and it dies hard.”

“There was the usual scattering of compulsive drinkers, the kind that reach very slowly for the first one and watch their hands so they won’t knock anything over.”

“He looked like a guy who had learned to roll with a punch.”

“They made hamburgers that didn’t taste like something the dog wouldn’t eat.”

“His eyes were like holes poked in a snow bank.”

“I don’t know him from a cow’s caboose.”

Here are selected bits that I liked from Raymond Chandler’s The High Window:

“His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.”

“… as thin as an honest alibi.”

“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

“I’d plug you as soon as I’d strike a match.”

“He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.”

“I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.”

“… a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.”

“… old men with faces like lost battles.”

“… a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve.”

“We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used-car salesman.”

“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all.”

“… as loud as a ton of coal going down a chute.”

“His face was as empty as my brain.”

“Breeze looked at me steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.”

“The limousine went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling.”

“… a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.”

“She had eyes like strange sins.”

“His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.”

“In my business tough boys come a dime a dozen. And would-be tough boys come a nickel a gross.”

“Class is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol.”

“His face was like a vacant lot.”

“I could use a five-dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”

“You wouldn’t notice the colour of a hummingbird’s eye at fifty feet.”

“Except for her face she would have looked all right.”

“… as flat as a flounder.”

“I don’t give one little flash in hell about you any more.”

“… a hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.”

“She’d have made a perfect nun. The religious dream, with its narrowness, its stylized emotions and its grim purity, would have been a perfect release for her.”

“It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you.”

“… the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal.”

Here are a few of my favorite bits from Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake:

“… a voice you could have cracked a brazil nut on.”

“The roar of his laughter was like a tractor backfiring.”

“… I’ve got a hangover like seven Swedes.”

“I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.”

“I breathed with my mouth open, as silent as a burglar behind a curtain.”

“[I left him there] moving his mind around with the ponderous energy of a homesteader digging up a stump.”

“I let the remark fall to the ground, eddying like a soiled feather.”

“He looked at us like a horse that has got into the wrong stable.”

“The nerve of the leg was jumping like an angry monkey.”

“Cooney’s little Irish nose … was spread over his face like syrup on a waffle.”

“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get.”

“… as wet as a bar towel.”

“… his eyes looked like the eyes of a sick animal.”

“[He had] evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone….”

“I smelled like dead toads.”

“I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it.”

“They were talking about me as if I was a piece of wood.”

“[He] couldn’t find a moth in a shoe-box.”

From the second book in the Travis (”permanently unemployed, by choice”) McGee series by John D. MacDonald, Nightmare in Pink (1964). I hope I turn some people on to these books by posting some of my favorite bits.

“… what is truly commercial is a kind of vulgarity upgraded just enough to look like good taste.”

“… the cop-eyes took the practiced flickering inventory — tailoring, fabric, shirt collar, knuckles and fingernails, shoe shine, haircut — all the subtle clues to status.”

“There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can’t fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience, such a boon to the ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listener, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover.”

“We are still carnivores, and money is the meat. If there’s a lot of money and any possible way to get at it, I think people will do some strange warped things. Hardly anybody is immune to the hunger, not if there’s enough in view. I know I’m not.”

“… as permanent as a black eye.”

“To score for the sake of scoring diminishes a man. I can’t value a woman who won’t value herself. McGee’s credo. That’s why they won’t give me a playboy card. I won’t romp with the bunnies.”

“I’ve never married and you can’t stay married, so perhaps all we’ve got is competence. And that makes a hell of a dry diet.”

“He had about him the same attitude toward sex as he had toward breakfast. He didn’t particularly care what was served as long as he could have a healthy breakfast that didn’t take too damned long.”

“I think we’re interested in each other, involved with each other, curious about each other. This was a part of exploring and learning. When it’s good you learn something about yourself too. If the spirit is involved, if there is tenderness and respect and awareness of need, that’s all the morality I care about.”

“Love is a gift, not a bargain.”

“She looked at me the way a butcher looks at a side of beef.”

“… my hotel looked like something designed to be thrown away after use. The old city was being filled with these tall tasteless rectangles, bright boxes which diminished the people who had to live and work in them. People kennels. Disposable cubicles for dispensable people. As I showered I wondered if perhaps these hideous tax-shelter buildings, with people sealed into the sour roar of manufactured air, didn’t play some significant part in creating New York’s ever-increasing flavor of surly and savage bitterness — a mocking wise-guy stink of discontent. Ugliness creates more ugliness. So these buildings could contribute, and so could the narrow greed of the truly vicious little trade unions. Screw you, buster, I’m getting mine. Thirty-hour week. Twenty-five hour week. Grind the last panicky dime out of the golden goose. So it’s down to twenty-five hours, which figures to ten bucks an hour, and anybody gets smart — all you do is walk out again and tie up the whole crappy city. But even when you’re working, what do you do with all those great raw boring horrible hunks of time? All those hours when if anybody looks at you just a little bit wrong, you want to smash them to a pulp. Man, we got a strong union. We got this city by the balls. But something is going wrong and nobody knows exactly what it is. You can read it in all the eyes you see.”

“You are as funny as a crutch.”

“We are all in a state of precarious balance, and it is difficult to realize how delicate that balance is until it is upset — either by emotions or clever chemistry.”

Related: Selected Excerpts from The Quick Red Fox - Part II | Part I

Selected Excerpts from The Deep Blue Good-By

Quite a few people emailed to thank me for posting Selected Excerpts from The Deep Blue Good-By — there are a lot of Travis McGee fans out there, I guess. Here’s the first part of my selected excerpts from The Quick Red Fox (1964):

“I wondered how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind.”

“Before you bet, you count what’s in the pot.”

“[She looked] like a fifty-peso floozy in a back-room circus in Juarez.”

“A man likes the illusion of exclusive option, even on the most temporary basis.”

“Bed is the simplest thing two people can do. If it goes with a lot of other things, it can be important, and if it goes with nothing else, it isn’t worth the time it takes.”

“Sexually disturbed people try to be the sword of the Lord, going around slaying the sinful.”

“Holding something alive, warm, sleeping is like handling fresh moist soil under the sun’s heat. Restorative.”

“I felt like a jackass adolescent who’d tried to tell a dirty joke in front of real people.”

“Self-evaluation… is the skin rash of the emotionally insecure.”

“Venus de Milo would have looked like hell in stretch pants.”

“A person can not endure inexplicable worthlessness. So they establish the pattern of proving themselves worthless.”

“I hum sad songs all day without making a single sound.”

“We can defend ourselves from our enemies, and even from our friends, but never from our family.”

“For the soul to be offended it must first exist.”

“He… had the animal’s awareness of something not quite right.”

“[We] sat like dulled passengers in a heavy train sidetracked at the end of noplace.”

“A man like that can’t believe anything that doesn’t sound crooked.”

“[He] looked at me with the concealed anguish of a toothless crocodile inspecting a fat brown dog on the river bank.”

“Ever since the popularization of the Freud-Fraud, we are all addicted to fingering ourselves to see where it hurts, Mommy. With no one to kiss and make well.”

“… it looked as if [his] nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction.”

“All the old pilgrims [to Las Vegas] wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion.”

“…[as] dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope.”

“Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after.”

“Violence is the stepchild of desperation.”