Frases de Raymond Chandler

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“Não há armadilha mais mortal que a armadilha que você armou para si mesmo.”

“A coisa mais durável na escrita é estilo, e estilo é o investimento mais valioso que um escritor pode fazer com seu tempo.”

“Em tudo que chamamos de arte existe uma qualidade de redenção.”

“Quanto mais você raciocina, menos você cria.”

“Estou convencido de que não existe nenhum meio limpo de se conseguir 100 milhões de dólares.”

“Acabei de odiar você. Está tudo lavado fora de mim. Odeio muito as pessoas, mas não as odeio por muito tempo.”

“O cheiro do café era forte o suficiente para construir uma garagem.”

“Para a memória do Sr. Stan Phillips. (...) Apenas mais um lavador de quatro rodas.”

“She had eyes like strange sins.”

“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.”

“The more you reason the less you create.”

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

“Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.”

“If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive.
If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.”

“She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

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

“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.”

“It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.”

“California, the department store state.”

“Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.”

“I'm killing time and it's dying hard.”

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”

“The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

“She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.”

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

“As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”

“A good title is the title of a successful book.”

“The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with.”

“(Henry Clarendon IV:) "Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?"”

“We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did.”

“She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.”

“They say money don't stink," he said. "I sometimes wonder.”

“The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.”

“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”

“The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head.”