Quotes from Cornell Woolrich

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")

Instead of questioning him directly any more, they had him spell out what he wanted to say letter by letter, Deadpan pointing them out on the chart and Kane jotting them down on a piece of paper — providing Eddie nodded yes — until he had complete words and sentences made up out of them.

Strange is loneliness; it still longs to have something to belong to, some group, some aggregate.

The bathroom door had a mirror on the outside of it, and I saw his face in that as he went by. It was evil, repulsive; you could tell by his face that his reason was slowly crumbling. He had his mouth open as if he was panting for air. The black beard, short as it was, made him look a little bit like an ape standing on its hind legs. He kept going back and forth, carrying clothes out of the closet.

HE HAD SIGNED her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar-butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other.

She passed through them without a glance. The living have no time to look at death; they cannot see it even if they try.

That which is so universal as death must be a blessing. And none may escape its benediction.

One sometimes kills for the love of it.

You are a sweet little thing. You are the morning sunlight in my dreary afternoon sky. It is not that you would do anything so unforgivable. It is just that there is a way of doing things that is right and a way that is wrong. You are young, and the world is old. When you are a few years older, I don't want you to have to look back on anything lacking in dignity, in which you cut a ridiculous figure.

No doubt about it. We've made a preliminary examination, and I don't even think we'll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anything else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn't been for them he'd have been a goner long before he was picked up." This went over my head at the time. I didn't understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital's.

How do you go about finding out who the best-loved woman in a guy's life is? Ask him?

Love is like an eggshell, isn't it? It can never be put together again.

And what is love anyway but the unattainable, the reaching out toward an illusion?

When you have an uneasy feeling that happiness is beginning to slip through your fingers you hang on as tightly as you can; you don't give it an added push away from you.

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.

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")

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.

Beside her, her husband could only splutter, and he stopped even that when she half turned to flash him a smile - the instinctive, brilliant smile of a woman who knows what feeble creatures men can be. You couldn't learn to smile like that. It was something a woman either knew the minute she was born, or never knew at all. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)

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")

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

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")

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

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.