"Both sides of the tracks are the wrong side, if you live close enough to them."
"She pouted, and frowned a little with her thin painted-on eyebrows. She didn't frown very hard because that gave girls wrinkles and besides I might kill her and she didn't want to die with a frown on her lovely face."
"Bess came out of her room. She had changed into a dress which had to be hooked up the back, and I was elected to be the one to hook it up. She had a strokeable-looking back, but my hands were careful not to wander. The easy ones were nearly always trouble. Frigid or nympho, schizy or commercial or alcoholic; sometimes all five at once. Their nicely-wrapped gifts of themselves turn out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it."
"They shook hands like brother and sister, but I saw his eyes take possession of her injured beauty."
"Bess was trouble, and a wise man once in Chicago had said once and for all: never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own."
Kitty: what are you, a do-gooder or something?
Archer: I wouldn't say so. I'm working at not being a do-badder.
"I woke up in the middle of the night. A spatter of rain was rustling like cellophane at the window. The whisky was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway."
-from Black Money by Ross Macdonald
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