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“If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental proposition with no lease. For everybody, tall and short, muscles and fat, white and yellow, rich and poor. I know that now. And it is good to know at a time like this”
― Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

“She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Aliceâ€� and Aliceâ€�”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing.”
― Barry Graham, Big Davey Joins the Majority: A Glasgow Noir Short Story

“There was nearly an inch of snow accumulated and Washington was rapidly sinking into hysteria.”
― Robert B. Parker

“I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.”
― Walter Mosley

“I read once that this man was in the chair and when the electrocutioner threw the switch the smoke came out of the man's head and formed a question mark over him and everybody said it was an omen, that maybe he didn't commit the murder they killed him for."
"Well," I said, "if they catch me, there won't be any question mark. There'll be an exclamation point.”
― Elliott Chaze

“The rain beat against the windows and against the tin roof of the hotel. It came down in hissing roars, then in whispers, then in loud shishes like sandpaper rubbed against wood. She drank the second glassful, climbed off the bed and began undressing, and then we were together, the cheap naked bulb still blazing down on the bed.

Thinking back, I remember the stupidest things; the way there was a taut crease just above her hips, in the small of her back. The way she smelled like a baby's breath, a sweet barely there smell that retreated and retreated, so that no matter how close you got to it you weren't sure it was there. The brown speckles in the lavender-gray eyes, floating very close to the surface when I kissed her, the eyes wide open and aware. But not caring. The eyes of a gourmet offered a stale chunk of bread, using it of necessity but not tasting it any more than necessary.

I remember getting up and coming back to her, and of throwing a shoe at the light bulb, later, when the whisky was gone. I remember the smell of rain-darkness in the room and her telling me I'd cut my feet on the light-bulb glass on the floor. And how she said I was no better than a tramp myself, that I made love to the cadence of the raingusts on the roof, and it was true I was doing just that, but it seemed the natural thing then. And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.”
― Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

“It was a bright day, but cold, and the whores had emerged, working the Combat Zone, looking cold and bizarre in their miniskirts, boots, and blond wigs. Being seductive at twenty degrees was heavy going, I thought. Being horny at twenty degrees wasn’t all that easy either.”
― Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript

“I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.”
― Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

“I wasn’t doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling.”
― Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

“De pronto le pareció, que el amor erótico y el amor romántico, no era nada más que una forma o varias formas del ego. Por consiguiente, lo que había que hacer era dirigir el ego de uno mismo hacia destinatarios que no fuesen personas, o hacia personas de las que uno no esperase nada. El amor podia ser puro, pero sólo si no era egoista.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Those Who Walk Away

“The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.”
― Henry Mosquera, Space Fandango: Backstabber's Blues

“You’re a full portion of what I don’t like,â€� she said. ‘Get out of my way.â€� I didn’t move. She didn’t move. We were both sitting down â€� and not even close to each other.”
― Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

“Candy nodded absently.
“Okay,� she said. “What shall I wear?�
“A gun,â€� I said.”
― Robert B. Parker, A Savage Place

“I've always thought hard-boiled detective novels an American art form. At their best, they're more than who-dun-its or thrillers, they're vehicles for a writer's observations about culture, politics, philosophy, music, history and a time or a place. Or life, it’s ownself. When you read James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett or James Lee Burke, their stories are always about far more than good guys chasing bad guys. That’s the kind of book I wanted to write. Still do.”
― Jim Nesbitt

“When you write, you start with what you know and build from there. I knew a little something about the border, Texas and Mexico from my journalism days. Knew some cops and redneck outlaws, too. And I knew I wanted to write a noirish detective novel. So I started with that and went from there. Out popped Ed Earl Burch, Carla Sue Cantrell and THE LAST SECOND CHANCE: An Ed Earl Burch Novel.”
― Jim Nesbitt, The Last Second Chance

“But you understand the relationship between pi and Gaussian curvature, right?”
― Danyl McLauchlan, Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

“Steve needed to be careful here. He'd read mid-twentieth-century science fiction so he knew that once you started switching realities you ran into problems with nested levels of existence.”
― Danyl McLauchlan, Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

“Se saremo fortunati, le nostre passioni più vive, resistendo agli anni, ci accompagneranno fino alla fine.”
― Alessandra Alioto, La dolce morte. Un'indagine genovese per il Maresciallo De Scalzi

“Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?
From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin”
― Russell C. Brennan, Adventures Of A Dark Duke : The Pin

“This is the Rock, sweetheart,â€� the owner added. “There’s no tragedy you can’t profit from.”
― Henry Mosquera, Space Fandango: Backstabber's Blues

“There’s no tragedy you can’t profit from.”
― Henry Mosquera

“It's only crazy if we fail.”
― Henry Mosquera, Space Fandango: Backstabber's Blues

“May they run free forever and grow back their limbs!”
― Henry Mosquera, Space Fandango: Backstabber's Blues

“She was a tall, seedy, sad-eyed blonde who had once been a policewoman and had lost her job when she married a cheap little check bouncer named Johnny Horne, to reform him. She hadn’t reformed him, but she was waiting for him to come out so she could try again.”
― Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

“Rachel drank some more bourbon. “What I am trying to do,â€� she said, “is to
thank you. And to say it as genuinely as I can. I do thank you. I will remember as
long as I live when you came into the room and got me, and I will always
remember when you killed them, and I was glad, and you came and we put our
arms around each other. And I will always remember that you cried.”
― Robert B. Parker, Looking For Rachel Wallace

“The Mass. Ave. Bridge is open... Some MIT students once measured it by repeatedly placing an undergraduate named Smoot on the ground and marking off his length. Every six feet or so there is still the indication of one smoot, two smoots, painted on the pavement. I could never remember how many smoots long the bridge was.”
― Robert B. Parker, Early Autumn

“Lots of cops married nurses, Tallow knew. Nurses understood the life: murderous shiftwork, long stretches of boredom, sudden adrenaline spikes, blood everywhere. Tallow almost smiled as he followed his wincing partner into the apartment building. He made sure the door closed as silently as possible, and only then did he draw his firearm.”
― Warren Ellis, Gun Machine

“IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.”
― Warren Ellis, Gun Machine