I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle t...
I said: You don't want to pick a fight with me, Mimi.She looked at me as if she were going to say I love you, and asked: Is that a threat?
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the ci...
He's cute, I said. Uh-huh, the grey man agreed, and so's dynamite.
He went like that, Spade said, like a fist when you open your hand.
He did not smile. I don't believe in anything, but I'm too much of a gambler not to be affected by a lot of things.
Cairo: You have always, i must say, a smooth explanation ready.Spade: What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?
Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.
Он исчез, как исчезает кулак, когда разжимаешь пальцы («Мальтийский сокол»)
Who shot him? I asked.The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v ofhis mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes werehorizontal. The V motif...
Sam Spade: When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it.
His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband—say, forty—with a mouth and chin that seemed shaped for gossiping.
He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.
You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just...
You might as well take your punishment and get it over with
My side felt a lot better when Nora called me at noon the next day. My nice policeman wants to see you, she said. How do you feel?Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober. I pushed Asta out of the way an...
Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.
Men came in and dragged us apart. It took us five minutes to bring Nora to. She sat up holding her cheek and looked around the room until she saw Morelli, nippers on one wrist, standing between two de...
If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of these cautious babies who'll look out the window at a cloudburst and say, It seems to be raining, on the off-chance th...