James M. Cain

James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892 – October 27, 1977) was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is considered a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction.

• We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.
  • "The Girl in the Storm" in Liberty magazine (January 6, 1940), republished in the collection The Baby in the Icebox (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981)

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

• They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
  • Ch. 1

• I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.
  • Ch. 3

• Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.
  • Ch. 5

• Just you and me and the road.
  • Ch. 5

• He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake.
  • Ch. 10

• We're the friendliest enemies that ever were.
  • Ch. 11

• We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.
  • Ch. 12

• I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.
  • Ch. 12

• "Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?"
  "Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."
  • Ch. 13

• Restaurant, hey. That's what I've got. Whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other.
  • Ch. 13

• Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate.
  • Ch. 15

• "Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death."
  "It's a date."
  • Ch. 15

First published in serial form by ''Liberty magazine (1936), later in the novella collection Three of a Kind, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

• I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.
  • Preface

• Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts.
  • Ch. 1

• A woman is a funny animal.
  • Ch. 5

• That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.
  • Ch. 7

• I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.
  • Ch. 8

• I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman.
  • Ch. 9

• "... Walter, the time has come."
  "What do you mean, Phyllis?"
  "For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart."
  • Ch. 14

• "There’s a shark. Following the ship."
  I tried not to look, but couldn’t help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs.
  "Walter, we’ll have to wait. Till the moon comes up."
  "I guess we better have a moon."
  "I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight."
  • Ch. 14

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

• When she tired, I loosened up a little, to let her blow. Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio , but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that.
  • Ch. 4

• Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it.
  • Ch. 6

• I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble.
  • Ch. 11

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

• If you have to do it, you can do it.
  • Ch. 1

• She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.
  • Ch. 2

• He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical.
  • Ch. 2

• A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it.
  • Ch. 3

• The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.
  • Ch. 11

• By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out.
  • Ch. 11

• A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.
  • Ch. 15

• Let's get stinko.
  • Ch. 17