“It's tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must've had some good points too.”

“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”

“...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.”

“Nora: "How do you feel?" Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.”

“To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.”

“When he awakened again he could stand, and did. He doused his head in cold water and drank four glasses of water. The water made him sick and after that he began to shake with a chill. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bare blood-stained mattress, but got up almost immediately to go stumbling and staggering in haste back to the bathroom, where he got down on hands and knees and searched the floor until he had found the rusty razor-blade. He sat on the floor and put the razor-blade into his vest-pocket. Putting it in, his fingers touched his lighter. He took the lighter out and looked at it. A cunning gleam came into his one open eye as he looked at the lighter. The gleam was not sane.”

“When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around-bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Sam Spade”