Noir Fiction Quotes & Sayings

From Chapter 1:
"You're not a local." I paused, unsure. "Or are you?"
"Sort of. Randall Van Dotson is my dad. I'm Rennie."
After tossing her head that coy, sweet way girls do, she gave me a candid appraisal. — Ed Lynskey

Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that. — James Ellroy

No whiskey, no religion, nothing. — Charles Willeford

The hotel was guest-friendly with hourly rates and had enough room to swing a cat, if it were a small cat and you wanted to swing it. — James A. Newman

You ever choke a man out with his own shirt?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"A yes or no one. — Todd Morr

There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup — Steen Langstrup

Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary. — Jeff Goldblum

Machines can't lie," I said, lying through my circuits. — Adam Christopher

In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball. — Ed Lynskey

The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet. — Will Christopher Baer

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear. — David Goodis

It's only crazy if we fail. — Henry Mosquera

That was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity. — Lily Gardner

About Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them. — Lily Gardner

Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?"
I felt it. I took it easy. — Ross Macdonald

You're a crime fiction writer if...The injustices of this world boil your blood. You become a fucking supernova. So you write. — Verge Le Noir

Life is swimming to shore with cowboy boots on. — Christopher G. Moore

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps. — Andrew Vachss

In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger's brow, the muggy air stifles - one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act. — Michael Dirda

The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars' place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn't bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house. — Raymond Chandler

That crap about doing something with your life are luxury problems. People like us have to play by a different rules.
#ShadowofSadd #Books — Steen Langstrup

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.

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want. — Richard Stark

After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber. — Brian Azzarello

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it. — Sara Sheridan

All we can do about this nightmare we live in is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at making us watch while relationships corrode. He knew the horrors that both love and lovelessness can breed, yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; for with whoever loves or needs love, Woolrich identifies, all of that person's dark side notwithstanding.
("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes. — Megan Abbott

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. — Adrian McKinty

How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939?

I remember.

I should remember.

I started it.

My name is Robert Leroy Parker. — Daniel DeLacy

Steve needed to be careful here. He'd read mid-twentieth-century science fiction so he knew that once you started switching realities you ran into problems with nested levels of existence. — Danyl McLauchlan

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

The only thing that ever leaves this place is that muddy water in the Rappahannock. — Randolph Randy Camp

Get a load of this, Frank." Gerald Peyton's pause set off his pronouncement. "She is expecting to get a wedding ring."
"That's understandable," I said, unsure how he could afford a ring on what our firm cleared. Diamond rings - more sold in December than in any other month of the year - went for a cool grand per karat. Weeks ago, I'd priced them - again - for my domestic situation. "What seems to be the problem?"
"That's a big leap for me to make."
"I expect you'll make it with room to spare. — Ed Lynskey

You always know when somebody's dead. — Kevin Bergeron

A diamond wedding ring, you say?"
I studied his face. Was he putting me on? He looked earnest. "As any guy would expect, a diamond is what she's after," I said. "Did you hold out hope you'd get by for anything less? — Ed Lynskey

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

Call me Dudley. We're of equal rank. I'm older, but you're far better looking. I can tell we're going to be grand partners. — James Ellroy

May they run free forever and grow back their limbs! — Henry Mosquera

My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!") signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there'd be real hell to pay. — Ed Lynskey

I've got to think of a hundred and sixty million Americans, not of the three or four that happen to be the ones I love. And it wouldn't be a big thing - security is built on lots of little thing. I don't like to talk about it. (Calhoun Hightower in Danger for Breakfast) — John McPartland

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

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

We saved the lives of a whole family that night. Children, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all sailed to safety in Sweden inside a little fisherman's boat."

Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup — Steen Langstrup

The waitress came by with a pot of black coffee. She was a smallish woman, about forty, still had some of her looks left, but she had a hardness to her face. Money and bad men were the only things that left that much stone in a woman. I nudged my cup in her direction, and she served her purpose in life. — L. Joseph Shosty

How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies? — Todd Morr

There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby. — Lily Gardner

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity. — Christopher G. Moore

I have saved no one but myself and now I watch for the other universe to unravel in my skull, for the sky to become my own skin and fill with stars. — Will Christopher Baer

Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham. — Ed Lynskey

The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord's name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading. — Andrew Cotto

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm. — Tom Vater

The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head. — Henry Mosquera

The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret. — Lily Gardner

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

Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard. — Thomas Jane

I rode a streetcar to the edge of the city limits, then I started to walk, swinging the old thumb whenever I saw a car coming. — Jim Thompson

This is the Rock, sweetheart," the owner added. "There's no tragedy you can't profit from. — Henry Mosquera

Foreign food isn't really my thing. I tasted whale once, and I was sick for a week. — Steen Langstrup

Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing. — Barry Graham

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

FICTION is a series of unintended coincidence,confabulation,and quasi-lucid lying made plausible enough for an author and a reader to cohabitate for a secret, brief and sinful affair. Nothing is real.Except imagination~with a pinch of perception, and a dash of collusion used as the Clabber.
Be So Advised. — J.D. Brayton

They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ... — Megan Abbott

Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that. — Ed Lynskey

Ever since I could remember, She was all that mattered. — James J. Caterino

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn't anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops ... Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it's always the same way ... They'll have some old bag on the payroll - I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they'll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear that crappy red polish all over her fingernails, and everything about her is smeary and sloppy and smelly. And she's the dame that always waits on me. — Jim Thompson

Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face. — Randolph Randy Camp

But what the hell, I thought as I lay there in the dark. It could be souls rot away with the body, too. What did anything matter in the long run anyway, except memories? And they only lived on in corpses that couldn't talk. — Will Viharo

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins. — Raymond Chandler

Freedom breeds uncertainty; uncertainty invites chaos. — R.J. Leahy

She was a cute as a washtub. — Raymond Chandler

I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars. — Walter Mosley

Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?
From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin — Russell C. Brennan

I let my gaze travel out the picture window. Unlike at my old doublewide trailer perched on the fringe of a played out quarry, here I owned a real yard with real grass that screamed for mowing each Monday a.m. I sat at the kitchen table, cooling off from just having finished this week's job. Yes, here in 2005, I was a full-fledged suburbanite, but I'd been called worse. — Ed Lynskey