Here are some of my favorite lines from Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister:

“I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait.”

“… she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favourite kitten.”

“I had that empty feeling of having miscounted the trumps.”

“… he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket.”

“His hand came out to [the glass of gin] with the beautiful anxiety of a mother welcoming a lost child.”

“… as bald as a grapefruit.”

“Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup.”

“Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”

“The corridor… had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.”

“… his thoughts… were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.”

“She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut.”

“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”

“[His] standard of ethics would take about as much strain as a very tired old cobweb.”

“You’re so goddamn smart you could talk your way out of a safe-deposit box.”

“My brain felt like a bucket of wet sand.”

“She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.”

“… a voice that could have been used for paint remover.”

“[He wore] a Charvet scarf you could have found in the dark by listening to it purr.”

“It made a sort of high keening noise, like a couple of pansies fighting for a piece of silk.”

“… a nose like a straphanger’s elbow.”

“[He] looked me over with that dead grey expression that grows on them like scum in a watertank.”

“I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff.”

“[He made] elegant little gestures and body movements as graceful as a Chopin ending.”

“She looked at me as if I had just come up from the floor of the ocean with a drowned mermaid under my arm.”

“He had the pinched look of a man who is waiting for a disaster to happen.”

“My mind had slowed to a turtle’s gallop.”

“… as hard to lift as a dead elephant.”

“I was as dizzy as a dervish, as weak as a worn-out washer, as low as a badger’s belly, as timid as a titmouse, and as unlikely to succeed as a ballet dancer with a wooden leg.”

“Her smile was the reverse of anaesthetic.”

“To say that she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been an insult to her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.”

“I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon embedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.”

“The parking lot was like ants on a piece of over-ripe fruit.”

“[He had] no more personality than a paper cup.”

“… as meaningless as the chattering of monkeys in the Brazilian jungle.”

“I pushed it open, with the tenderness of a young intern delivering his first baby.”

“He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas.”

“I wouldn’t give you the dirty end of a burnt match.”

“He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”

“A shave and a second breakfast made me feel a little less like the box of shavings the cat had had kittens in.”

“… as breezy as a Britisher coming in from a tiger hunt.”

“… as restful as a split lip.”