84 Quotes About Hard-boiled

She told me she was 17 going on 22, when she left home to find a new life in the city. She wanted to get into acting and be a big star someday. I said that was swell but a tough racket to break into. She said she knew that going in. She thought maybe she'd get a lucky break and go from there. I told her lucky breaks always came with a price.

It all started when she walked into my office that night unannounced. She told me she was in trouble. So I asked what kind. She said it was of the killing kind. Wanted to know if I could be trusted. I said up to a point, depending on who got killed.

THE POUNDING RAIN HAD STOPPED as suddenly as it had begun. Sheets of silver green neon clung hungrily to the moist black asphalt like some reptilian skin.

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to bethese days, when I got this call. I could hear the rainbattering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin’ wide in the turns.

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.

Chance is life's only certainty.

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.