Cornell Woolrich Quotes & Sayings

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

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.'
I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.
("All At Once, No Alice") — Cornell Woolrich

You his brother?'
'Yes, damn it!' I burst out. "And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!'
'Funny,' said a dick dryly, 'but so do we.'
I didn't like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man has just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.
("Walls That Hear You") — Cornell Woolrich

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn't bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He's seen that kind of bug before, plenty of times. No flash, no report, to show which direction it came from. Silencer, of course.
He hasn't moved. Fsssh! and a bee or wasp in a hurry strokes by his cheek, tingles, draws a drop of slow blood. Another pokk! from the wall, another bug rolling over. The insect-world seems very streamlined, very self-destructive, tonight. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

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

She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer. — Cornell Woolrich

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

She was beautiful, only hers was the dark beauty of night, just as Sherry's was the bright beauty of daytime. Her hair was raven-black, ending in a sort of widow's peak low on her forehead, and her face and arms were alabaster- white. Her gown was a clinging thing of swirling black, almost like smoke, and two peculiar shoulder-draperies she wore, hanging down loosely and caught at the wrists, almost suggested great triangular wings when her arms were in motion.
Her lips were a red gash in the pallor of her face, and they glistened as though she had daubed them with fresh blood instead of rouge.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Call me Faustine," she said low. I saw her staring fixedly at me, with a sort of half-smile on her face, but her gaze rested a little lower than my own face. I fingered my neck uneasily. "Is there something on my collar?"
("Vampire's Honeymoon") — Cornell Woolrich

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.
The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. ("The Moon of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

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

A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O'Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there's a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall.
A voice from the car says blurredly, while the ground rushes up to meet him, 'Finish him up, you guys! I'm getting so I don't trust their looks no more, no matter how stiff they act!' ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasn't obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless you've got plenty of small change.
("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

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

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered him with my gun. It didn't faze him in the least, he kept moving right on past me toward the street-door. Not quickly, either; as slowly as if he was just going out for a walk. He said, 'It isn't my time yet. You can't do anything to me with that.' ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

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

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two its gradations are different. With some it comes fast, with some it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.
("Too Nice A Day To Die") — Cornell Woolrich

It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn't come without the other.
("Too Nice A Day To Die") — Cornell Woolrich

The white moth of hope fluttered before her face. — Cornell Woolrich

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn't roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn't bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn't like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

After she's gone, another brief lull sets in. This one is probably the last. But what good is a lull? It's only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened. Because anticipatory fear is always twice as strong as present fear. Anticipatory fear has both fears in it at once - the anticipatory one and the one that comes simultaneously with the dread happening itself. Present fear only has the one, because by that time anticipation is over.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

It takes will power and nerve to hold the stick that way, to keep his eyes open and watch the rocky face of the cliff, pine-bearded, rush up at them. O'Shaughnessy's mouth flattens, his face goes white. And then in that final fraction of a moment, he laughs, a little crazily - a laugh of defiance, of mocking farewell, and, somehow, of conquest.
'Here we go, baby!' he shouts, teeth bared. 'Now I'm going to find out what it really feels like to fly into the side of a mountain! ... '
There is only the storm to hear the smash of the plane as it splinters itself against the rock - and the storm drowns the sound out with thunder, just as the lightning turns pale the flame that rises, like a hungry tongue, from the wreckage. ("Jane Browns Body") — 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") — Cornell Woolrich

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle - a jab into a vein ...
("For The Rest Of Her Life") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

It was male, of course; menace is always male. ("Nightmare") — Cornell Woolrich

I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

Go to Zillicks down the block. It has three booths at the back. Go in the middle one and wait. When you lamp me turning the pages of the directory outside, shove your money in the return-coin slot and walk out. Take it easy. Don't let the druggist see you. Your stuff'll be there when you go back for it. If you're even a dime short don't show up, it won't do ya no good. Twelve o'clock tonight.'
'Twelve o'clock;' Fisher agreed. They separated. How many a seemingly casual street-corner conversation like that on the city's streets has just such an unguessed, sinister topic. Murder, theft, revenge, narcotics. While the crowd goes by around it unaware. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

She's a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic - you can't take your eyes off her. She's dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn't walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word. ("Kiss Of The Cobra") — Cornell Woolrich

There was a pause, while I fought against this other, lesser kind of death that was creeping over me - this death called strangeness, this snapping of all the customary little threads of cause and effect that are our moorings at other times. Slowly they all drew back from me step by step, until I was left there alone, cut off.
("All At Once, No Alice") — Cornell Woolrich

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

One of the two owners, the man who had been sitting in the front room, was stretched out in there asleep, stockinged-toes pointed at the ceiling, one hand backed defensively against his eyes to ward off the light. He'd taken off his vest and shoes, and that strap that wasn't straight enough to be a suspender-strap was dangling now around one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. It ended in a holster, with a black, cross-grained slab of metal protruding from it. Turner couldn't take his eyes off it, while the long seconds that to him were minutes toiled by.
That meant out, that black slab, more surely than any door. He had to have it. More than that, it meant a continuance of out, for so long as he had it. And he wanted out with all the desperate longing of all trapped things, blindly scratching, clawing their way through a maze to the open. To the open where the equal chance is. — Cornell Woolrich

So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you'll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?
Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.
Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.
Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

She opened a small silver compact and looked at her face in its mirror. I am still guiltless, she thought, I have not done it yet. But I will look the same when I have done it; nobody will know the difference by looking at me. She touched the little puff twice to her nose and once to her chin. She closed the compact and put it away.
("Mind Over Murder") — Cornell Woolrich

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

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City Hotel. — Cornell Woolrich

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

Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity. — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

And I still say it was just a coincidence;' he muttered pugnaciously. 'You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!'
Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night-sky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively in at them. ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

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") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

There's a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: 'There he is.' As though you were the most important one of all. (And you're not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren't.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you're not.) It's a nice little tribute, and it don't cost anyone a cent.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

The struggle doesn't last long; it's too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it's easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer's collar.
Tereshko is trembling with his anger. 'Now him again!' he protests, as though at an injustice. 'All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! What'sa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, don't kick at him, that'll never do it - I think the guy has nine lives!' ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

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

The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

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

You haven't any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it's been given.
And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expect.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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") — Cornell Woolrich

When she comes down to supper I don't like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She's put on a shiny dress, all fishscales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head she's put a sort of beaded cap that fits close-like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you can't tell whether she's a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, there's a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You can't be sure what it is, but it's shaped like a question mark. ("Kiss of the Cobra") — Cornell Woolrich

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

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. — Cornell Woolrich

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

Gosh, it's easy!' he marveled, open-mouthed. 'I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow 'em, and all it takes is one little push!'
He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn't! And here he'd been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it!
Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.
That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.
Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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) — Cornell Woolrich

O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick-and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O'Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

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

The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with - a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

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

She thrust out her arms wide, in strange ritual of triumph, as Mimi Brissard had in Paris. She was a black, ominous death-cross against the starlight for a moment. Then she turned slowly, her eyes two green phosphorescent pools, toward where the helpless secret service man lay. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

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

After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt.
They stood him up, his back to the well.
In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy.
("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.
There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.
His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder") — Cornell Woolrich

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

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.
("Three O'Clock") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

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

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

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

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

They came out into the open, and it was the grimy backwaters of Jersey City now. Tall factory stacks, and fires burning, and spreads of stagnant stinking water.
On and on the ride went. On and on and on.
They turned north soon and left the big city and all its little satellites behind them, and after a while even the rusty glow on the horizon died down and was gone. Then trees began, and little lumpy hills, and there was nothing but the darkness and the night and the fear. ("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write. — Cornell Woolrich

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