Quotes from Cornell Woolrich

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")

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")

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")

We said a lot of things; we said nothing.

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.

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")

To be worshiped, though I didn't realize it at the moment, is a far more dangerous situation to be in than simply to be desired.

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")

I didn't look over my shoulder; there wasn't a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told me. Little needles of warning that gathered at the back of my skull told me. I'd never known until then that the jungles aren't so very far behind us, after all, and tails, and four feet instead of two. Where else did those symptoms come from? ("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight")

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there. "The ride's over," someone said. "End of the ride." For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it. ("The Number's Up")

Something deep within him, what it was he had no leisure nor skill to recognize, seemed to retreat down long dim corridors away from the doom that impeded. He hadn't known he had those convenient corridors of evasion in him, with their protective turns and angles by which to put distance between himself and menace. Oh clever architect of the Mind, oh merciful blueprints that made such emergency exits available.

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

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

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

what is cruelty but the giving of pain in the taking of pleasure?

Take it easy," he jeered, "relax. I used to be a sailor. You'll never get out of them knots, buddy.

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")

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")

But there are three things in this world you can't shrug off: death, taxes – and a girl who loves you.

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")

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

Roses die, candles go out, tears dry. The memory of the page outlasts them all.

I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities.... The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free.... The first link, of the so-strong chain of habits, of custom, that binds us all, had snapped wide open.

The only kind of questions he could answer were those that took "yes" or "no" for an answer — by shaking his head up and down or from side to side — and that limited them to about one out of every ten that they wanted to put to him. I saw red when I saw how helpless he was.