The Lady in the Lake Quotes

“I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me—and I didn't think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can't tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I don't like your manner," Kingsley said in a voice you could have crack a Brazil nut on.

"That's all right," I said. "I'm not selling it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man's tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?” Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?” “Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.” Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“O tempo é como a primigénia Uroboros. O tempo são os momentos que se esvaem, grãos de areia que passam na ampulheta. O tempo é constituído por momentos e acontecimentos com os quais tentamos medi-lo com tanta insistência. Mas a primigénia Uroboros lembra-nos que cada momento, cada instante, cada acontecimento, guardam em si o passado, o presente e o futuro. Cada instante guarda em si a eternidade. Cada partida é ao mesmo tempo um regresso, cada despedida é uma saudação, cada regresso uma separação. Tudo é simultaneamente um começo e um fim.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Lady of the Lake

“I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass where cows grazed. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But yesterday was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam around leering like an elderly roué. Just as I was about to burst from lack of air, the corpse came alive under my arm and got away from me and then I was fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling over and over in the water spinning its long hair.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I'll listen, till my fancy hears
The clang of swords' the crash of spears!
These grates, these walls, shall vanish then
For the fair field of fighting men,
And my free spirit burst away,
As if it soared from battle fray.”
― Sir Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake

“And ne er did Grecian chisel trace A Nymph, a naiad or a grace Of finer form or lovelier face.......”
― walter scott, The Lady of the Lake

“And most men can stand what they’ve got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye. Like they’re doing all over the world right now.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I was meeting the spitting boys today.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“Go on,” he said, in a voice the size of a marble.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“The thing looked cut and dried to them. A nasty affair between two rather nasty people, too much loving, too much drinking, too much proximity ending in a savage hatred and a murderous impulse and death.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I walked back down the room and out. The little blonde at the PBX looked at me expectantly, her small red lips parted, waiting for more fun. I didn't have any more. I went on out.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady In The Lake

“Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake