RAYMOND CHANDLER

"What kind of work do you do mostly?"
"Anything that's reasonably honest," I said.
He nodded. "Reasonably is a word you could stretch. So is honest."
I gave him a shady leer. "You're so right," I agreed. "Let's get together some quiet afternoon and stretch them."
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"Who?"...
"Quest. Q as in quintessential, U as in uninhibited, E as in Extrasensory, S as in Subliminal, T as in Toots..."

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"You'd be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is," he said. "It sounds so simple when you hear it played well... Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer."

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Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.

--(The Little Sister)

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"Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?"
"It takes about three years."
"Three years?" He looked shocked.
"Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses."

__________

I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don't read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.

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They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops' eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school.

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The car was never found by any police. It was stolen sometime in the night, driven most probably to El Paso, fitted with new keys and forged papers, and put on the market eventually in Mexico City. The procedure is routine. Mostly the money comes back in the form of heroin. Part of the good-neighbor policy, as the hoodlums see it.

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...My voice seemed to echo off into the distance and get small and lonely.

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He leaned back in the big chair he was sitting in and took me to pieces with his hard gray eyes.

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The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little.

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--(The Long Goodbye)