Dashiell Hammett Quotes

Either this guy really liked me, or I was inventing things in my head because I wanted him to like me. I was much too inexperienced to guess which.

Our very hopes belied our fears, Our fears our hopes belied; We thought her dying when she slept, And sleeping when she died.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

The little waiter's eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.

I don't know (if they were men or women running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.

Bones,” I sighed. “Know something? I’m not afraid of you, but you scare me….” His outline blurred again. “You scare me, too, Kitten,” he might have replied, but I couldn’t be sure.

People have a natural tendency to read emotions out of faces, so when you see a face that is hyperreal but without the life behind the eyes, it's really off-putting and intriguing.

Tavi looked wildly around the courtyard, and when his gaze flicked toward them, his face lit witha ferocious smile. "Uncle Bernard! Uncle Bernard!" he shouted, pointing at Doroga. "He followed me home! Can we keep him?

I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

...she was still water in his hands. He didn't know how to hold on.

In midair, dangling lost above the world.

Maybe Liz was right and she'd wanted someplace safe. Maybe Mr. Solomon really did understand that running was the only way Macey would find out if we'd run after her. Or maybe, like me, she just wanted to disappear for a little while

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not.

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

Sam?" Rachel asked. "Do you know you have the saddest sad face ever?

One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile.

The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either.

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.

Are you saying you don't love me?" Hazael asked Liraz. "Because I love you. I think." He paused in contemplation. "Oh. No. Never mind. That's fear.

To me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you, and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that's where I sort of come at it.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me.

He gave her his best smile. His best I-almost-died-so-how-can-you-deny-me smile. Or at least that’s how he hoped it appeared. The truth was, he wasn’t a very accomplished flirt, and it might very well have come across as an Iam- mildly-deranged-so-it’s-in-all-of-our-best-interests-if-youpretend- to-agree-with-me smile.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.