Frasi di Raymond Chandler

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“In lontananza si levava e si spegneva l'urlo sovrannaturale delle sirene della polizia o dei pompieri e né l'una né l'altra tacevano mai molto a lungo. Per ventiquattr'ore al giorno qualcuno fugge e qualcun altro tenta di raggiungerlo. Laggiù, nella notte intessuta di mille delitti, individui morivano, venivano mutilati, tagluzzati da schegge di vetro, schiacciati contro i volanti delle automobili o sotto le ruote di pesanti veicoli. Altri individui venivano percossi, derubati, strangolati, violentati e assassinati. Altri individui ancora erano affamati, ammalati, annoiati, disperati, tormentati dalla solitudine, o dal rimorso, o dal terrore, o dall'ira, erano crudeli, febbricitanti, squassati dai singhiozzi. Una città non peggiore delle altre, una città perduta e corrotta e colma di vacuità. Tutto dipende dalla posizione in cui ci si trova, dagli interessi personali. Io non ne avevo alcuno. E me ne infischiavo.”

“Il primo bacio è magico, il secondo intimo, il terzo unʼabitudine.”

“L'alcol è come l'amore: il primo bacio è magico, il secondo è intimo, il terzo è routine. Dopo di che, spogli la donna e basta.”

“Chiedere aiuto non è facile… specie quando la colpa è tutta nostra.”

“Scommetto che non indovinate come abbia fatto ad entrare.
Presi una sigaretta e la guardai tetramente: – E io scommetto di sì. Siete entrata dal buco della serratura come Peter Pan.
– Chi è?
– Oh, un tizio che ho conosciuto al biliardo.”

“Se credi in un ideale, non sei tu a possederlo, è lui che ti possiede.”

“I poliziotti non dicono mai addio. Sperano sempre di rivederti fra gli indiziati.”

“Nella vita non è mai il buono a tenersi la ragazza.”

“Credo che sia sempre un errore intromettersi nelle faccende di un ubriaco. Anche se ti conosce e ti ha in simpatia, non è escluso che ti rifili un pugno sui denti.”

“I morti sono i migliori colpevoli di questo mondo. Non si difendono.”

“Alla TV, un investigatore lo si riconosce subito. Non si leva mai il cappello.”

“Hammett ha restituito il delitto alla gente che lo commette per un motivo, e non semplicemente per fornire un cadavere ai lettori; e con mezzi accessibili, non con pistole da duello intarsiate, curaro e pesci tropicali.”

“Il romanzo poliziesco ha prodotto peggiore letteratura che ogni altro genere di narrativa, salvo il romanzo d'amore, e probabilmente migliore letteratura che qualsiasi altra forma letteraria largamente accettata e apprezzata.”

“Sono uno spasso, no? – domandò. Risposi bruscamente: – Come un filippino il sabato sera.”

“Ero vuoto di vita come le saccocce di uno spaventapasseri. Mi spinsi fino al cucinotto e mandai giù due tazze di caffè nero. Si possono patire postumi di sbronza per diverse cose oltre l'alcool. Io ne provavo per le donne. Le donne mi facevano ammalare.”

“Non esiste trappola più letale di quella che hai preparato per te stesso.”

“Dire addio è morire un po '.”

“Era un ragazzo che parlava con virgole, come un romanzo pesante. Al telefono comunque.”

“Hollywood è meravigliosa. Chi non la ama è o pazzo o sobrio.”

“You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.”

“There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.”

“Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

“Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

“Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

“He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in.”

“The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.”

“You know what Canino will do---beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.”

“The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

“Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”

“The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.”

“Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.”

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.”

“[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.”

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.”

“She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.”

“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

“A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.”

“The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.”

“Okay, thees Hench no good, but poor guy, drunk, no job. Pay no rent, but I got lotsa money. So I say, Look, Hench, you make the confess. You sick man. Two three weeks sick. You go into court. I have a lawyer for you. You say to hell with the confess. I was drunk. The damn coppers are stuck. The judge he turn you loose and you come back to me and I take care of you. Okay? So Hench say okay, make the confess. That's all.'
I said: 'And after two or three weeks the bad brother is a long way from here and the trail is cold and the cops will likely just write the Phillips killing off as unsolved. Is that it?”

“On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.”

“He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.”

“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”

“A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.”

“"Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be."”

“He used to wear a little blond moustache but Mother made him cut it off. She said -'
'Don't tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

““Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.”

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”