She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
Interpretation
The quote conveys a deep emotional connection that a smile can bring, suggesting it has lasting value.
In this quote, Raymond Chandler captures the enchanting and impactful nature of a smile, emphasizing how a simple gesture can leave a profound impression on oneβs heart and mind. The imagery of a smile being felt in a 'hip pocket' suggests that such a smile is both treasured and held close, evoking warmth and affection that one can carry with them throughout their day.
In practice
Using this quote in a wedding speech to express the joy brought by love.
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
Love is the sea where intellect drowns.
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
But from a distance. I would have left you whole and wholly for the delectation of those who wanted more and cared less.
My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.
The command is to love him, not just to think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship - for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God - without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman - legalistic and impersonal.
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