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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 16f9b6d | 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!' | film movie movie-theater movie-theatre | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 1ab1284 | 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 .. | plane plane-crash suicide | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 3ca90a1 | 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")" | tragedy | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 3036142 | Play it, Eddie, don't be foolish;' she urges. 'Now's the time, break the spell once and for all, prove to yourself that it can't hurt you. If you don't do it now, you'll never get over the idea. It'll stay with you all your life. Go ahead. I'll dance it just like I am.' 'Okay,' he says. He taps. It's been quite some time, but he can rely on his outfit. Slow and low like thunder far away, coming nearer. Boom-putta-putta-boom! Judy whirls o.. | fear voodoo | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 4ad3021 | 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")" | moon night | Cornell Woolrich | |
| e2df096 | She gave a little sob deep in her throat. 'Call it a prophecy, call it a prediction, call it fate - call it what you will. I fought against it hard enough, God knows. But the evidence of my own eyes, my own ears, my own senses, is too much for me. And the time's too short now. I'm afraid to take a chance. I haven't got the nerve to bluff it out, to sit pat. You don't gamble with a human life. Today's the 13th, isn't it? It's too close to .. | death fate-destiny inescapable prediction prophecy | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 15b4e54 | That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action. | fiction-writing pulp pulp-fiction writers writing | Cornell Woolrich | |
| fd75293 | Pero soy humana y, como tal, contradictoria y llena de inconsecuencias. | Rosa Montero Gayo | ||
| df47493 | When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away. I didn't try to put it back.. | after-death after-life afterlife death dying heaven limbo twentieth-century | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 06c7bfc | I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things t.. | fear men men-and-women women | Cornell Woolrich | |
| fde42af | 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.. | tribute | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 8a06c1f | 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, plent.. | guns noir shots sniper | Cornell Woolrich | |
| f27ea08 | 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")" -- | lousiville | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 8e8a9e8 | 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.. | gunplay guns mob mobsters noir shot | Cornell Woolrich | |
| db7952c | The sun goes down and it's night-time in New Orleans. The moon rises, midnight chimes from St. Louis cathedral, and hardly has the last note died away than a gruesome swampland whistle sounds outside the deathly still house. A fat Negress, basket on arm, comes trudging up the stairs a moment later, opens the door, goes in to the papaloi, closes it again, traces an invisible mark on it with her forefinger and kisses it. Then she turns and he.. | voodoo | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 7675e62 | It had grown darker now; it was full night already, with the swiftness of the mountainous latitudes. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with magnificent stars like many-legged silver spiders festooned on its underside. Below them the white roses gleamed phosphorescently in the starlight, with a magnesium-like glow. There was a tiny splash from the depths of the well as a pebble or grain of dislodged earth f.. | night | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 98f2496 | 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 lig.. | noir noir-fiction suspense | Francis M. Nevins | |
| 6523cd3 | 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.. | fate | Cornell Woolrich | |
| a5f9e17 | Para ser, tenemos que narrarnos, y en ese cuento de nosotros mismos hay muchisimo cuento: nos mentimos, nos imaginamos, nos enganamos. | Rosa Montero | ||
| d754656 | 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.. | vampire | Cornell Woolrich | |
| db0ab3f | 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 | ||
| 57026f5 | 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 | ||
| e291feb | 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 .. | fear horror house | Cornell Woolrich | |
| ee7460b | 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 .. | medicine progress science | Cornell Woolrich | |
| d7f336e | 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.. | crash pilot plane | Cornell Woolrich | |
| ab2a1ab | 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. | noir-fiction writer writing | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 375089b | 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")" | fear fearless | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 42591d1 | Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories - most included in this volume - which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out of control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalis.. | cornell-woolrich fantastic gothic horror noir noir-fiction science-fiction suspense | Barry N. Malzberg | |
| 38ef7b8 | 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'Shaugh.. | fight fistfight scuffle | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 57a000d | 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")" | business-advice | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 6ab6674 | 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 | ||
| fb63d82 | A veces la proximidad con la muerte te llena de una extrana, casi visionaria serenidad. | Rosa Montero | ||
| 5f94c9f | 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 separat.. | drug-dealer drugs pusher | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 01cf655 | Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")" | love relationships | Cornell Woolrich | |
| fffac0f | all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")" | honor morality | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 19d2dbe | you've got to plan for the nonshopper as much as the shopper. | Paco Underhill | ||
| cb1f37b | something about rules--you have to either follow them or break them with gusto. | Paco Underhill | ||
| f266474 | Our Country is Gone, our cause is lost | confederate-states-of-america | Sam R. Watkins | |
| 0e9010b | While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spo.. | Sam R. Watkins | ||
| 5da5036 | Los humanos nos defendemos del dolor sin sentido adornandolo con la sensatez de la belleza. Aplastamos carbones con las manos desnudas y a veces conseguimos que parezcan diamantes. | Rosa Montero | ||
| 2ebec57 | Liguei para Carmen Garcia Mallo, uma das minhas melhores amigas, com o animo sombrio e furibundo: -- Hoje eu queria escrever, tinha o dia todo para escrever, e desperdicei o tempo respondendo e-mails. -- Por que? -- Sei la. As vezes a gente evita comecar o trabalho. E uma coisa esquisita. -- Por preguica? -- Nao, nao. -- Por que? -- Por medo. Nao soube explicar, mas ontem, na desprotecao extrema da noite, na claridade alucinada da noite, en.. | Rosa Montero | ||
| eb82fe9 | La vida es un pequeno espacio de luz entre dos nostalgias: la de lo que aun no has vivido y la de lo que ya no vas a poder vivir. Y el momento justo de la accion es tan confuso, tan resbaladizo y tan efimero que lo desperdicias mirando con aturdimiento alrededor. | nostalgia vida | Rosa Montero | |
| 6a92a0e | Estoy convencida de que a todos los humanos nos aguarda en algun rincon del mundo el libro que seria perfecto para nosotros, la lectura que nos abriria las puertas de ese mundo maravilloso que es la literatura. De modo que aquellos a quienes no les gusta la lectura solo serian individuos que aun no han tenido la suerte de encontrar su precioso libro-llave personal. Veran, yo creo mucho mas en esta predestinacion que en la amorosa. En realid.. | Rosa Montero | ||
| 71012a4 | Hay que hacer algo con todo eso para que no nos destruya, con ese fragor de desesperacion, con el inacabable desperdicio, con la furiosa pena de vivir cuando la vida es cruel. Los humanos nos defendemos del dolor sin sentido adornandolo con la sensatez de la belleza | Rosa Montero |