"They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there. "Drunk," the cop said. The other one turned me around into the light. "He dont smell bad. That cut on his head didnt come from a fall either." "Mugged?" "Maybe." I didnt give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now. Now was a time when I wasnt anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when its torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom."
Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, called the "king of pulp fiction". He was best known for stories featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer.
"I knew a couple of things... during the war years they came out with reprints of all the Dumas novels, Moby Dick, for the servicemen, and I saw this and believe me Im a very sharp merchandiser, and I say this is the new marketplace for writing: original paperback books."
"The little guys face was a bloody mess. Between the puffballs of blue-black flesh that used to be eyelids, the dull gleam of shock-deadened pupils watched Dilwick uncomprehendingly. His lips were swollen things of lacerated skin, with slow trickles of blood making crooked paths from the corners of his mouth through the stubble of a beard to his chin, dripping onto a stained shirt. Dilwick stood just outside the glare of the lamp, dangling like the Sword of Damocles over the guys head. He was sweating too. His shirt clung to the meaty expanse of his huge neck. He pushed his beefy hand further into the leather glove and swung. The solid smack of his open hand on the little guys jaw was nasty. His chair went over backward and his head cracked against the concrete floor of the room like a ripe melon. Dilwick put his hands on his hips and glared down at the caricature that once was human."
"All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of a cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held. Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a hairbrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her. That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, "Thanks, mister."
"The temperature was six below zero and it kept me dying on the spot because the blood coagulated and clotted in ugly smears of cloth and skin and the pain hadnt started yet, so when the little fat guy who saw my eyes open and still bright pulled me away from the carnage he was almost in the shock I was going into. Nobody would listen to him. He was a drunk. I was nearly dead. Sometimes the body responds to a stimulus that cant be explained. He got me upright. I walked woodenly, dyingly. I was sat in an old car. The fat man rolled down the windows. The blood stayed frozen. My hands were numb and I couldnt feel my feet. Idly, I wondered what frostbite was like. Breathing was a thing that was happening, but at a pace that said it could slow, then stop at any time. A dull, squeezing sensation of pain was beginning to gnaw on my insides and I knew that eventually, and very soon, it would grow into a terrible, devastating animal with an awful hunger and I would be eaten alive by it. I wanted to scream but nothing would come out."
"The cops arent exactly dumb, you know. We can get our own answers. Not like I can. Thats why you buzzed me so fast. You can figure things out as quickly as I can, but you havent got the ways and means of doing the dirty work. Thats where I come in. Youll be right behind me every inch of the way, but when the pinch comes Ill get shoved aside and you slap the cuffs on. That is, if you can shove me aside. I dont think you can."
"See, heroes never die. John Wayne isnt dead, Elvis isnt dead. Otherwise you dont have a hero. You cant kill a hero. Thats why I never let him get older."
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"