Charlie Chan Quotes

He turned to Miss Minerva. "I'm relying on you, at any rate. You've got a good mind. Anybody can see that." "Thank you," she said. "As good as a man's," he added. "Oh, now you've spoiled it!

Truth is rare fruit in garden of murder.

Men who had poetry in their soul come silently into the world and live quietly down the years, and yet when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid enough to compare with the light they shed when they are among the living.

Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman -- Tell us about the film you're going to make. Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story. Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London? Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing. Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it? Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you. Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.

he dragged his words painfully from the poets

Chan shook his head. 'Impossible in Rear Bay at Boston,' he said, 'but here at moonly crossroads of Pacific, not so much so. Twenty-five years of my life are consumed in Hawaii, and I have many times been witness when the impossible roused itself and occurred.

I haven’t said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. “My” period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn’t remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors’ faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations.

He has been sitting here looking at me more in sorrow than in anger for the better part of an hour, and I've made up my mind to one thing. I shall have no more secrets from the police.

Even if we ran into Charlie Chan he’d only smile and give us some proverb.

After further discussion it was settled that he was to have the upper berth, the old man the lower, and the boy the couch. The Reverend Mr. Upton seemed disappointed. He had played the role of martyr so long he resented seeing any one else in the part.

As I say, I'm not sorry I talked. I can look any man in the eye again and tell him to go to..." He glanced at Miss Minerva. "Madam, I will not name the precise locality.

Softly, softly, catchy Monkey

Just because you act a little guilty doesn't mean you're innocent.

Do we become so lost in the patterns and the rhythms in our everyday lives that we fool ourselves into believing they might somehow last forever?

Good lord -it's only ten o'clock!" A great calm had settled over the house, there was no sound save the soft lapping of waves on the beach outside. "What, in heaven's name, do you do out here?" "Oh, you'll become accustomed to it shortly," Miss Minerva answered. "At first, you just sit and think. After a time, you just sit." "Sounds fascinating," said John Quincy sarcastically. "That's the odd part of it," his aunt replied, "it is. One of the things you think about, at first, is going home. When you stop thinking, that naturally slips your mind.

She was glad of a moment without talk. For this, after all, was the time she loved Waikiki best. So brief, this tropic dusk, so quick the coming of the soft alluring night. The carpet of the waters, apple-green by day, crimson and gold at sunset, was a deep purple now. On

Humbly asking pardon to mention it, I detect in your eyes slight flame of hostility. Quench it, if you will be so kind. Friendly cooperation are essential between us.

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses—so blunt and yet so beautiful—it’s impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

Some Japs killed themselves. Who gives a shit? No tickee, no washee. Where's Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto? It's Sunday morning - this sure beats church.

Perhaps her abruptness was merely part of her personality, for she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one, from blunt, square haircut to blunt, clean fingernails to blunt, efficient pumps. But perhaps it was me, still morally disoriented from the crapulent major’s death, as well as the apparition of his severed head at the wedding banquet. The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted. So perhaps that was why when I crossed over the threshold into the marble foyer, I instantly suspected that the cause of her behavior was my race. What she saw when she looked at me must have been my yellowness, my slightly smaller eyes, and the shadow cast by the ill fame of the Oriental’s genitals, those supposedly minuscule privates disparaged on many a public restroom wall by semiliterates. I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But as she advanced along the polished bamboo floors, steering clear of the dusky maid vacuuming a Turkish rug, I just knew it could not be so. The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men. Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.

Think of the comic heroes, like Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, Jim Carrey, Kung Fu Panda, or Roberto Benigni in “Life Is Beautiful”. They win by being playful, creative, adaptive, irreverent, and unbound by norms. Those who take life too seriously are the opposite, and at a disadvantage.

What was life after all, but a constant battle between our hopes and harsh reality?