““I can wait,’ she said simply. ‘He has to have this chance.’ She drew me down to the chair beside her and rested my head on her shoulder where I could hear her fine, soft breathing. ‘You see,’ she said reflectively, ‘he never had a chance to really be young; he had too much to fight, too hard a world to face. He was never an adolescent in the literal sense of the word. He sprang from childhood directly into manhood. That’s why he seemed old to us kids. That’s why some of us liked him and others didn’t. There weren’t any halfway measures in the way you felt about him. It was one way or the other. But beneath it all he was just a little boy hungry for someone to like him, to love him.””
![“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.” quote by Arundhati Roy](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f2d/arundhati-roy-346_arundhati-roy_she-was-perhaps-too-young-to-realize-tha_2380487.jpg)
![“He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” quote by Raymond Chandler](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/614/raymond-chandler-629_writing_he-james-cain-is-every-kind-of-writer-i_41185.jpg)
