RT: The hilarious elegance of Raymond Chandler's prose strikes me much the same way. (Consider that a recommendation to read him.) Those two lines are more or less the opening exchange of dialogue in his first novel, The Big Sleep: "Tall, aren't you?" / "I didn't mean to be." I had to reword slightly, because of course Alina and Ali had already known each other.

It's amusing the way the great 1946 Humphrey Bogart movie adaptation preserved the spirit of the dialogue despite having to alter it to accommodate the fact that Bogart was in reality quite short.