Bicky

“Everything, he decided, was almost unbearably sad. Life was wonderful, but nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and the world was beautiful, but nobody looked at it except tourists.”
― Craig Rice, Trial by Fury

“When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. . . .
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordi-nary qualities. Perry Mason is the perfect detective because he has the intellectual approach of the juridical mind and at the same time the restless quality of the adventurer who won’t stay put. I think he is just about perfect. So let’s not have any more of that phooey about
“as literature my stuff still stinks.” Who says so—William Dean Howells?

Raymond Chandler to Erle Stanley Gardner, 1946”
― Richard B. Schwartz, Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction

“Our world is in equilibrium. The annihilation, the killing, of any creatures that inhabit this world upsets that equilibrium. And a lack of equilibrium brings closer extinction; extinction and the end of the world as we know it.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Sword of Destiny

“from the short story, Cielo Azul

“Harry, get an ambulance.”

I stood up and stepped back from the scene. I felt my chest growing tight, a clarity of thought coming over me. In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part in pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death.

And in that moment I knew we had done just that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.”
― Michael Connelly, Suicide Run