"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. "
— Raymond Chandler

"Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

""Picture anybody so stupid he didn't know hope is just another phase you'll grow out of""
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"...one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played
again."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

" "unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

""Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)