Cornell Woolrich Quotes

#1. She was ready to be a fugitive with him for the rest of her life - 'Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people' - and when a Parisienne is ready to leave Paris behind forever, that's something. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#2. You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.
("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

#3. I hate the world. Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty. (from COVER CHARGE - currently not listed)

Cornell Woolrich

#4. I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.

Cornell Woolrich

#5. His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God.
("Introduction")

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

#6. You can always tell a car door, no other door sounds quite like it.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#7. Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#8. His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.

Cornell Woolrich

#9. Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumbtacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#10. Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction")

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

#11. It wasn't an attack. We'd been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#12. It was male, of course; menace is always male. ("Nightmare")

Cornell Woolrich

#13. He was standing by the window, looking down, when I went in. Even the sight of his back, sloping a little at the top with the inclination of his head, did something to me. And anyone that can love a back, can love.
("Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#14. I was trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.

Cornell Woolrich

#15. How simple death without weapons was. How safe for the killer.
("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

#16. As for her perfume, it was the kind you only noticed after she'd left a room, not while she was still in it. Even then you didn't realize it was perfume, you only wondered what had made you think of her just then.

Cornell Woolrich

#17. Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#18. I got another chestful of air in, tore loose with it. 'Somebody help me! You people standing around looking, isn't there one of you will help me? I brought my wife here last night; now she's gone and they're trying to tell me I never -'
("All At Once, No Alice")

Cornell Woolrich

#19. A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.
("Three O'Clock")

Cornell Woolrich

#20. The story thread suddenly dropped in a hopeless snarl, just as he was about to get it through the needle's eye of the first line.

Cornell Woolrich

#21. She had said: 'You could not hate anyone that much -' She was mistaken. What did she know? She felt so good right now, this must be hate, what else could it be?
("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

#22. We don't marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again.
How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.

Cornell Woolrich

#23. I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.

Cornell Woolrich

#24. All a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty ... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#25. Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

#26. Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.

Cornell Woolrich

#27. The shears found his throat this time. He fell down on top of them and was silent.
Something dark like mucilage glistened where he lay.
She had jumped back - not in remorse, but to keep the bottom of her skirt clear of his blood. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#28. There was no time to weigh chances. There was no such thing as chances anyway, in the distorted perspective of the weed fumes.

Cornell Woolrich

#29. And then finally she came - and the whole world faded out around us and we were just alone on the crowded sidewalk. I've heard it called love.
("I Won't Take a Minute" aka "I'll Just Be a Minute" aka "Wait for Me Downstairs" aka "Finger Of Doom")

Cornell Woolrich

#30. And he's alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he's never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.
He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call it - and he can't. Something's bothering him to keep him awake. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#31. The portieres were drawn across the French windows now, veiling the stars outside - that were there nevertheless. ("Speak To Me Of Death")

Cornell Woolrich

#32. The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#33. That's a man's vital spot, the helpless thing he loves. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#34. It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

Cornell Woolrich

#35. Perry, the manager, had come up with him, in trousers and bathrobe. He was a stout, jovial-looking man ordinarily, but right now he was only stout.
("The Room With Something Wrong")

Cornell Woolrich

#36. New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#37. Being broke didn't seem so awful as it had yesterday, being broke but being at peace with the world.
("Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#38. Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#39. It's six o'clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#40. It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.
("For The Rest Of Her Life")

Cornell Woolrich

#41. Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did.

Cornell Woolrich

#42. Murder is such an elastic term, isn't it?
("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

#43. It's just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals have it too.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#44. It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he's missing a lot by being like this - fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is - if anything - ever to bring it back. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#45. She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.

Cornell Woolrich

#46. Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.

Cornell Woolrich

#47. Keep her downstairs a minute!' I breathed desperately. I don't know why; you don't want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman. ("Nightmare")

Cornell Woolrich

#48. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. ("Dusk To Dawn")

Cornell Woolrich

#49. Fisher just stood there lost in thought, without saying anything. There is always a rational explanation for everything in this world - whether it's the true one or not. Maybe it is better so. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

#50. It was as simple as that - they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be beautiful, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.
("For The Rest Of Her Life")

Cornell Woolrich

#51. All guys are scared of each other, didn't you know that? I'm not the only one. We're all born afraid.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#52. What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man's life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#53. And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")

Cornell Woolrich

#54. The white moth of hope fluttered before her face.

Cornell Woolrich

#55. The French doctor - the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors - says: "M'sieu, they have all been on the wrong track - ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#56. But that's the Way, and there is no other. And once his mind's made up, the trembling and aimless walking stops, and he can look doom in the face without flinching. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#57. Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don't you're a fool. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#58. There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.

Cornell Woolrich

#59. She is in full delirium. But delirium is the antithesis of death; it is the body's
struggle to survive. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Cornell Woolrich

#60. Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")

Cornell Woolrich

#61. There's an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich