The Lady In The Lake Quotes
"The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips."
"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."
"Not all kinds. Only the fairly honest kinds."
"I stood up. 'If you're Mr. Derace Kingsley.' 'Who the hell did you think I was?'"
"Most of the clients start out either by weeping down my shirt or bawling me out to show who's boss. But usually they end up very reasonable—if they're still alive."
"I don’t like your manner. 'That’s all right,' I said. 'I’m not selling it.'"
"Time passed and silence descended on the scene."
"It's a nasty habit to get out of bed in the morning."
"I’d rather be dead than live with you any longer. - Muriel."
"I’m working hard to think you are a fundamentally good egg. Help me out a little, can’t you?"
"We wouldn’t print anything that would embarrass Jim Patton. Jim’s the salt of the earth."
"I’ve seen a lot of crazy people, but I don’t go for that worth a peanut shell."
"Wood’s one of the few things people will steal up here, but folks who might steal it off a pile wouldn’t break a lock to get it."
"Once done he has to use what brains God gave him to cover up what he done."
"Most men can stand what they’ve got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye."
"I reckon she was about thirty, or a little more or a little less."
"It’s mighty hard to tell a woman’s age these days."
"The guy that sees too much detail is just as unreliable a witness as the guy that doesn’t see any."
"Life isn’t like that at all—not life as I have known it."
"All guns have been fired sometime. All guns have been loaded sometime."
"Through no fault of yours the chance to avoid scandal is pretty well shot. It's a question of my wife's neck now."
"His misery had a theatrical flavor, as real misery so often has."
"But none of that means anything. Because we are looking at it from the angle of calculation, and people who commit crimes of passion or hatred, just commit them and walk out."
"What I was doing down there and why. At the worst they'll find her and prove she killed him. At the best they'll find her a lot quicker than I can and let me use my energies proving she didn’t kill him."
"She’s a girl who would do about what she pleased in that way."
"Women—even decent women—make such ghastly mistakes about men."
"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."
"Motors purr gently in thousands of cars on thousands of streets, everywhere."
"Life’s too short for me to be filing charges of assault against police officers."
"People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so."
"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."
"This is all between us. I’d like you to keep it that way."
"I’ve had enough trouble. Go away and leave me be."
"I’m tired, I’m so damn tired. Beat it, mister. Be nice and go away."
"I live here, mister, if you call it living. Anyway, it’s the nearest I can get to living. I want a little peace and quiet. Now you get out and leave me alone."
"I don’t have a phone, if I knew them. Go away, copper. I’m sick. I’ve been sick for a month."
"I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too."
"You're a cold-blooded little bitch if I ever saw one."
"It's too late at night, too still, and the window is open and the gun would make too much noise."
"There’s something a little off key about everything you do."
"It will all come back to you. Some day it will all come back to you. And you won’t like it."
"Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly."
"I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them."
"I was as drunk as a skunk, I guess. Anyway, much drunker than I like to be."
"Your wife is dead, Kingsley. If it’s any news to you."
"Go on, I suppose you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t."
"Hell, a little thing like strangling your wife and clawing her belly wouldn’t worry you that much, would it?"
"I don’t get this. Honest, I don’t. It wouldn’t be that somebody is kidding me, would it?"
"Nobody could possibly know that better than you know it, Degarmo."
"After a month in the water? With his wife’s clothes on her and some of his wife’s trinkets? Why would he even have a doubt about it?"
"He hadn’t ought ever to give a man like me a break. I been a shooter more years than you been alive, son."
"He’s a killer. He ain’t that kind of killer."