Noir Quotes

Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.

Taking my drink, I moved around the bar to her. Her smile was a little crooked as I sat down. I guessed it had been a wet night for platinum blondes.

A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone.See Spot.See Spot run.See Spot run from a gaping chest wound.Run Spot run.See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.

Normally, I don't take to drinking so early in the morning, but I bend the rules when I get my ass kicked before sunrise."--Thomas Morelli

This is the Rock, sweetheart,” the owner added. “There’s no tragedy you can’t profit from.

There was nothing like the cold, heavy steel of a gun, the soft moan of an appreciative woman or the sharp burn of a good single malt to make a man grateful to be alive. Tonight, with his gun gone and his sex life a wasteland, Dash had to settle for whiskey.

Shouldering the duffel bag with the Marine Corps bulldog, Old Man knocked Jan's photo off the bed table. He turned to stone staring down at the photo. His face then splintered into hurt. Tears seeped into his eyes. He grappled for the nearest bedpost and slumped forward on extended arms. His shoulders jerked and head sagged a little while his heart broke. Old Man cried the mute cry of men of his generation.

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")

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

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.

I never met an addict who came from a nice home . I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home.

The dark clouds make the black sea. (Les nuages noirs - Font la mer noire)

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back.

It's only crazy if we fail.