Best 155 quotes in «noir quotes» category

This is the best book ever written on its subject. Granted being the only such book takes a lot of the steam out of that accomplishment.

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

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")

Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…

Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush? “Okay,” it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin’ nothin’ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women… I would not be an exception.

We were all puppets of someone in a self-perpetuating circle of pollutants, violence and hedonistic escapism.

We don’t know when the first star exploded, or when the sun caught on fire. We don’t know when the sun will stop burning and turn cold and dark, though we know it will. In between the fire and the cold, life beginning and ending, Laura, sometime after being born and before dying, plays a game and talks to a sister who has never existed, while Frank tells a little girl named Whitney a story about the life and death of a dog, a story that he sometimes believes while telling it. In the cities of the Sonoran Desert, the sunshine follows you into the shade. When you drink water anywhere, however pure the water, you’re drinking the piss of dinosaurs. The volume of water in this world has never varied. Nothing comes or goes, increases or decreases. On a speck of dust in what they call the universe, David and Frank search for Laura, and Laura searches for David and Frank. La Llorona searches for her children. Whitney wants to not be sad. All of them search for love.

What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass. “I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously. “Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky. “…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair. “Yeah, sure,” he answered. “Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked. “…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed.

When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task. “But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. “It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you. “The silence of the dead says, Goodbye. “The silence of the missing says, Find me.

What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

When I heard the gunshots, though, I knew - knew beyond the shadow of a doubt - that somewhere in Los Angeles Bette Davis was on the prowl and packing heat. ("Shadows From The Screen")

When you write, you start with what you know and build from there. I knew a little something about the border, Texas and Mexico from my journalism days. Knew some cops and redneck outlaws, too. And I knew I wanted to write a noirish detective novel. So I started with that and went from there. Out popped Ed Earl Burch, Carla Sue Cantrell and THE LAST SECOND CHANCE: An Ed Earl Burch Novel.

When you're reading a good noir, the shocks and twists have a way of feeling deja vu-like, as if you saw them coming, but hoped the characters would take a left turn... not answer the phone, not sleep with that woman, not sell drugs to those cops... but knew they would. It would have been wrong if they didn't, and the real surprise can be that you care about someone you know is in for hell. You relate to them, even when their hell is so much bigger than your own. But we're all going to die, and we all make mistakes. The best noir stories make you forget plot entirely by giving you characters that feel so well-realised you can't look away as they fall.

Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.

It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

But, number one, I think traditional noir doesn't work in contemporary storytelling because we don't live in that world anymore

Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one's all right, he turns legit.

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.

(In) most cop shows, every cop in the squad speaks exactly the same and the same kind of short clipped film noir-ish talk.

You always know when somebody's dead.

You do know I’m not psychic, right?’ Dash looked down at her. ‘Joy...you do know that normal people don’t see ghosts, right?

You ever choke a man out with his own shirt?” “What kind of question is that?” “A yes or no one.

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.

I pity those born of the lighter side. They have no understanding of how seductive cruelty is. The music made out of screams and pleas for mercy. Mmmm. Nothing better. (Noir)

Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.

The noir universe hates do-gooders so it tries to pound them and punish them.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

[after Sammy struggles to unhook Stilton's bra] She rolled onto her face to give him a good shot at the hook in the back. "Free my people!" "I will. I am the Harriet Tubman of your breasts.

Where are we? (Jericho) Noir’s happy place. It’s where he brings the beings he wants to play with. (Asmodeus) Punish. (Jericho) You say ta-mah-to. I say to-mah-to. (Asmodeus)

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.

There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.

All I knew was where it had started, a year before. The three strikes against me and all the reasons I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t have explained the girls, the women, who had briefly entered my life. Briefly changed it. [He] wouldn’t have understood their laughs, their indignations, their secrets. For the rest of the night my eyes drifted to the people on the street, the girls, the women, and I felt like I was seeing the lives they wouldn’t live.

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")

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")

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

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")

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly. I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear. 'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.' 'Wh-where are talking from?' 'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.' The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass wearily aside, came slowly out. One of them flashed a badge - maybe Crow had loaned him his for the occasion. 'You're being arrested for putting slugs in that phone. It won't do any good to raise your voice and shriek for help, try to tell people different. But suit yourself.' I knew that as well as he; heads turned to stare after us by the dozens as they started with me in their midst through the station's main-level. But not one in all that crowd would have dared interfere with what they mistook for a legitimate arrest in the line of duty. The one with the badge kept it conspicuously tilted in his upturned palm, at sight of which the frozen onlookers slowly parted, made way for us through their midst. I was being led to my doom in full view of scores of people. ("Graves For The Living")

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

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")

Catboy slept that night curled up on the Kid’s chest. There was a huge windstorm that blew canopies of rain between the buildings of the apartment complex. Vanjii, of course, slept through it, but the Kid spent most of the night somewhere between waking and sleeping. He could hear the wind and rain all the time, and sometimes he could feel Catboy’s claws on his chest, kneading. He dreamed that the wind was an old bruja, a witch, wandering the deserted streets outside, looking for Catboy so she could take him away and hurt him.

Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.

Ciemność jest naturalnym środowiskiem reportera. Świat jasno oświetlony nie jest dla reportera tematem.

Dash shoved his hands on his hips and looked down into the bowl. ‘You gave my fish pink rocks?’ he said as he turned to face her. Joy shrugged. ‘I didn’t really look at the colour I just grabbed the nearest bag.’ ‘It had to be pink?’ ‘There’s some blue as well.’ He looked into the bowl again. ‘Not really.’ Joy couldn’t believe she was having a conversation about pink rocks when the bigger question of what the hell he’d found out about the robberies was still unanswered. ‘You think it’s going to turn Ralph gay?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Given that he’s living his life out solo it’s kind of a moot question, don’t you think?’ ‘You’re right, I think he needs a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend.’ ‘With those rocks? I think he needs Fishtank Barbie in there.’ ‘Is your masculinity threatened because your fish has pink rocks?’ Dash folded his arms. ‘He’s a bloke. He doesn’t do pink.’ Joy glanced at the bowl. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘It...blends.’ ‘He’s orange,’ Dash said. ‘Since when have pink and orange gone together?

De pronto le pareció, que el amor erótico y el amor romántico, no era nada más que una forma o varias formas del ego. Por consiguiente, lo que había que hacer era dirigir el ego de uno mismo hacia destinatarios que no fuesen personas, o hacia personas de las que uno no esperase nada. El amor podia ser puro, pero sólo si no era egoista.

Don't make a career out of underestimating me." — Claire de Haven

Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.

El habia esclarecido inninterrumpidamente, durante los cinco años siguientes, cuatro asesinatos, de un modo que a sus colegas les habia parecido alucinante, es decir injusto, provocador. -No pegas ni golpe, Adamsberg-le decían-. Estás ahí, vagando, soñando, mirando la pared, haces dibujitos deprisa y corriendo sobre las rodillas, como si poseyeras ciencia infusa y tuvieras la vida ante ti, y luego, un día, te presentas, lánguido y amable, y dices: "Hay que detener al cura, ha estrangulado al niño para que no hable".