Dashiell Hammett Quotes

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

There are times when I love the world and love everyone, and I want to talk to everyone, and other times when I feel really disillusioned, and like none of this is real, nothing is real around me.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

There are so many worlds and I have not yet conquered even one.

Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.

in a middle of a room stands a suicide sniffing a Paper rose smiling to a self "somewhere it is Spring and sometimes people are in real:imagine somewhere real flowers,but I can't imagine real flowers for if I could,they would somehow not Be real" (so he smiles smiling)"but I will not everywhere be real to you in a moment" The is blond with small hands "& everything is easier than I had guessed everything would be;even remembering the way who looked at whom first,anyhow dancing

But the same things that had once attracted menow left me with a mild sense of unease. Ivy would say I was getting smarter, but I just felt…empty.