Carmen Sternwood: You're not very tall are you?
Philip Marlowe: Well, I, uh, I try to be.
Sherlock Holmes: The young lady is taking her mother to Scotland for burial.
Inspector Lestrade: In a coffin?
Sherlock Holmes: That is the customary method, I believe.
The Hospital Staff - The Doctors: Dr. Barnes: Did you get us here just to insult us?
The Police: Inspector Cockrill: No. I only like to strike an informal note.
Holmes: However, it's a mistake to accept something that's true merely because it's obvious.
Professor Charles Rankin: Murder can be a chain, Mary, one link leading to another until it circles your neck. Red was digging at the grave of the man I killed. Yes, your little man.
Mary Longstreet: You killed him?
Professor Charles Rankin: With these hands. The same hands that have held you close to me.
Cora Smith: It's too bad Nick took the car.
Frank Chambers: Even if it was here we couldn't take it, unless we'd want to spend the night in jail. Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing a man's car, that's larceny.
Eugéne François Vidocq: Sometimes the chains of matrimony are so heavy they have to be carried by three.