She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch - Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.

Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else.