Quotes About Noir

Unlike our scattered dead that Ernie Pyle saw on distant foreign hillsides, we are collectively seeing ours here at home. We are looking into the abyss of a new American Noir like the one in 1940s but worse. This time there will be no solemn homecoming flotillas of the dead in flag-draped coffins from overseas; they are already here with us in mass graves like New York's Hart Island and in refrigerator trucks in hospital and funeral home parking lots.

I'm a huge fan of Cabernet and Bordeaux, and am passionate about Pinot Noir and Burgundies.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds. A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.

A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now.

She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon's tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella.

It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.

I bet she snaps a mean garter.

You're as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?" "Sure." "You can call me Vivian." "Thanks, Mrs. Regan." "Oh, go to hell, Marlowe." She went on out and didn't look back.

The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.

Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing.

If any city was a study in noir et blanc—be it black-and-white photography, film, or literature—Paris was it. The French versions of all three techniques were born during the Age of Romanticism. So was the concept of the daredevil avenger-antihero of the noir crime novel genre, the so-called polar, a Parisian specialty I learned to love.

crêpe de sarrasin. Confusingly, sometimes buckwheat (sarrasin) is called blé noir, so if you ask for a crêpe de blé noir, they'll understand perfectly what you're talking about.

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

I grew up watching Hong Kong noir films. As a kid, I often imagined myself playing the lead role in such movies, performing gun fights and sacrificing myself for the sake of friendship.

As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.

Maya, Indian goddess of illusions. Siren of shipwrecked sailors. If only you lactated Pinot Noir, you'd be perfect.

Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it.

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow's nastiest and best noirs, Where Danger Lives and His Kind of Woman) said he was the only director who could outdrink him. When he wasn't hitting the bar, Farrow liked to discuss theology with visiting nuns and priests.