Time & Perspective Quote by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett nails a whole character with the casual cruelty of a shrug. "She seems" keeps the speaker at a distance, like we are watching Lily through cigarette smoke and bad lighting, never fully granted access to her interior life. The line feels tossed off, but it’s doing hard work: it frames worry not as a private crisis but as a habitual atmosphere, something you can carry while still laughing, drinking, flirting, surviving.

"Pretty good time" is the key bit of Hammett misdirection. It’s bland, almost reportorial, the way hard-boiled voices flatten experience into simple categories. That flatness is the point. It suggests a world where pleasure isn’t purity; it’s an improvisation, a tactic. Lily’s enjoyment doesn’t cancel her anxiety, and her anxiety doesn’t earn her special nobility. She’s not a romantic heroine suffering beautifully. She’s a person with a working relationship to dread.

Then the tag: "That's Lily". It’s affectionate and fatalistic at once, a tiny epitaph spoken while the subject is still alive. Hammett’s noir genius is that he treats personality as destiny. The sentence implies a pattern: this is what she does, this is how she moves through danger, this is what you should expect from her the next time the room gets tense. In a Hammett universe, "despite" is never resolved; it’s the permanent condition of modern life, where the party and the panic share the same glass.