Matt Chandler Quotes

“It's so much more than a child's story. - Matt Chandler on LIFE Today.”

“It's so much more than a child's story. - Matt Chandler on LIFE Today.”

“He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.”

“He realized that time, clocks ticking, everything is just a human-made concept. That clocks didn’t tick back in the times he was seeing now, and he realized that the sun never sets as long as you travel with it, circumnavigating the globe, once every 24 hours. It was a new thought, a new dogma to Jordan, evolving his idea of being more than one at once. It was an idea of being more than one time at once, literally moving along the 4th dimension. Not being pushed to the side, not being pushed up or down, not being pushed inward or outward, but being pushed in one way, without ever moving at all. They were being pushed along the track of time, with no way to go back, with no way to retract and go back to the starting point as they could in any of the three visible dimensions. And it was that thought, Jordan finally realized, that made him exhausted and scared. It was that realization that made Jordan realize that this was the thing Tong was afraid of. That through all his travels on planes and all his moving around the world, he could still go back to Bangkok, he could still go back to the hospital where he was born, but he could never go backward on that track and stand in the same place, only the same location, as where his first day began."-A Spontaneous Existence, Chandler Ivanko”

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“And, really, she did like Chandler, too. She did. What woman wouldn’t? He was handsome and successful, a member of one of Nashville’s oldest and most prominent families. But she’d never felt anything more than a friendly sort of affection for him, and even that usually only came about after she’d consumed a good, dry Manhattan. Preferably during a two- for- one happy hour. At any rate, she’d never experienced for Chandler the kind of feeling a woman should have for a man she thought about marrying, that breathless kind of wanting, that aching sort of yearning, that endless, ferocious passion, that insistent, frenzied, needy demand, that hot, sweaty, wanton arousal that made a woman just want to rip off her clothes and wrap her naked body around a man and feed herself to him whole, that...that… Ah, where was she? Oh, yes. At any rate, she’d never experienced that sort of, um, feeling for Chandler that a woman should have for a man with whom she intended to spend the rest of her life.”

“She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.”

“Ladies, if you’re single there is nothing wrong, sinful or wicked about desiring a husband, nothing. Anyone who would say otherwise is absolutely lying to you. God wired you for it, He built you for it. Men, there is nothing wrong, wicked, or evil about wanting a wife. I don’t know when that happened, I don’t, now listen I do think that you need to be content where you are today, alright, but listen I’m content with what Christ is doing in me today but I don’t want to be who I am today, I’m hoping Christ will complete what He began. It’s okay, it’s alright, who made it so complicated? it’s okay, it’s okay to want a wife, it’s okay to want a husband, those are good things, they’re really good things. It’s okay, it’s okay to want.”

“The problem for me is that I can't ever really see who Gregory is, any more than I can see what a mirror by itself looks like, because he reflects whoever's around him.”

“He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.”

“I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything.”