The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6)

by Raymond Chandler

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He’s going to let it go on for a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he’s apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.”

A difficult thing, being a cop. You never know whose stomach it’s safe to jump up and down on.

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Your friends don’t have a lot of luck lately, do they? They get dead.”

Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system.

Chess problems seldom run to more than four or five moves. Beyond that the difficulty of solving them rises in almost geometrical progression. An eleven-mover is sheer unadulterated torture. Once in a long while when I feel mean enough I set it out and look for a new way to solve it. It’s a nice quiet way to go crazy. You don’t even scream, but you come awfully close.

There’s nothing around here but one great big suntanned hangover.

When you said goodnight in those days you tried not to make it sound like goodbye.

I didn’t expect anyone to jump six feet into the air and scream and nobody did. But there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. I had it. I had it all around me, thick and hard.

He was a weak man, unreconciled, frustrated, but understandable. He was just a husband. Paul was either much more or he was nothing. In the end he was nothing.”

the unfinished novel of the very much finished popular author.

Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there’s such a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers.

A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer.

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.

That was a dream girl. Some of her was here and now, but a lot of her was there and then.

I went through my regular double play with the morning mail. Mail slot to desk to wastebasket, Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me. Goodbye, Howard.”

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

Cops never say goodbye. They’re always hoping to see you again in the line-up.

“Goodbye, Linda. I hope you find what you want.” “Goodbye,” she said coldly. “I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.”

You’re not big, you’re just loud.”

“Do you have something against marriage?” “For two people in a hundred it’s wonderful. The rest just work at it. After twenty years all the guy has left is a work bench in the garage. American girls are terrific. American wives take in too damn much territory.

“Suppose it lasted six months or a year or two years. What would you have lost except the dust on your office desk and the dirt on your venetian blinds and the loneliness of a pretty empty kind of life?”

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.

“El honor no se mueve de lado como los congrejos. That is, honor does not move sidewise like a crab, señor.”

“You were already in there, chum—writing the letter.” He reached up and took the dark glasses off. Nobody can change the color of a man’s eyes. “I suppose it’s a bit too early for a gimlet,” he said.

“It’s pretty tough to turn a woman in for murder—even if she never meant much to you.”

I got in a bad jam. I happened to know the sort of people who know how to deal with bad jams. They owed me for an incident that happened long ago in the war. Probably the only time in my life I ever did the right thing quick like a mouse.

“Of course. An act is all there is. There isn’t anything else. In here—” he tapped his chest with the lighter—“there isn’t anything. I’ve had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago.

I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.