Best 155 quotes in «noir quotes» category

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

Lots of cops married nurses, Tallow knew. Nurses understood the life: murderous shiftwork, long stretches of boredom, sudden adrenaline spikes, blood everywhere. Tallow almost smiled as he followed his wincing partner into the apartment building. He made sure the door closed as silently as possible, and only then did he draw his firearm.

No whiskey, no religion, nothing.

May they run free forever and grow back their limbs!

Nobody saw what happened next, or else nobody admitted to it. A couple of people said they saw the Kid stand up, turn around quickly, and sit down again. But neither of those people was there at the time. The teacher had turned her back to the class and was writing on the board. She heard something and looked around. Gordon Ritchie was coming towards her, reaching for her, whimpering. The Kid’s pen was sticking out of Gordon’s face. The Kid had stabbed him with it, stabbed him so hard that it pierced his cheek and impaled his tongue. The teacher backed away from Gordon, trying to take in what she was seeing. Bubbles of blood were coming out of his mouth. Some of the children ran out of the room. Others screamed or cried. The Kid just sat at his desk, as though there had been no interruption to the class.

No me atrevería a decir que te equivocas, aunque tampoco podría darte la razón.

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

Luis found all this very exciting. He had enthusiasm for myths, legends, bad omens, bad weather, supernatural happenings and inexplicable events. His passion for superstitions and doomsaying drove his other family members crazy. He didn’t often meet curious strangers with whom he could share his fantastic tales.

Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?

Rachel drank some more bourbon. “What I am trying to do,” she said, “is to thank you. And to say it as genuinely as I can. I do thank you. I will remember as long as I live when you came into the room and got me, and I will always remember when you killed them, and I was glad, and you came and we put our arms around each other. And I will always remember that you cried.

one of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.

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.

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.

One time, she waddled out and showed Peg her bandages from her last suicide attempt, which invokes sympathy in some, but usually makes me imagine someone holding out a pile of dog shit and saying "Look what I almost stepped in!

Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn’t that the American dream in a nutshell.

Quando alzai la testa, ormai fradicia, ero di nuovo davanti alla centrale. Non mi ero nemmeno accorto che la sigaretta si fosse spenta a causa della pioggia; solo quando mi fermai l’odore acre del mozzicone bagnato che avevo tra le labbra raggiunse pungente le narici, disgustandomi. Lo sputai lontano, come a volermi liberare di un qualcosa che mi assillava da anni, ma quell’amaro che sentivo in bocca non se ne andò, anzi, sembrò restare per ricordarmi il sapore della realtà. Lo stomaco mi si rivoltò dallo schifo. Guardai il mio riflesso in una pozzanghera agitata dall’acqua che cadeva, e per la prima volta sentii il peso di ciò che era diventata la mia vita: un qualcosa di cui non mi sarei mai potuto liberare. Mi resi conto che tutto questo avrebbe finito per consumarmi e dopo tanti anni mi sentii di nuovo solo.

Retirement had seemed like the best way not to die, but the adrenaline had gone the day I threw in the towel and it never returned. You have your books and your movies, your daydreams and your moments in the sun, but none of those can save you any more than irony can.

Restai con lo sguardo fisso a osservare quella figura che si allontanava, fino a sparire; finché non mi accorsi che, nel punto dove stavo guardando, ormai non c’era più nessuno.

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

[She] had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidently set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.

She killed to get the dream she wanted, then found out it didn't want her back.

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

She wore a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.....She had a voice that made pearl harbour sound like a lullaby.

She just stood there and looked at the empty highway, and you could almost tell how bored she was by the way she stood.

She looked hot enough to catch fire, but too lazy to do anything but just lie there and smoke.

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 bed lets out a slight gasp of air from the mattress like an old cat fart, but it looks like she’s too caught up in herself to notice.

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

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

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.

That pistol I gave you is a piece of crap. You can’t hit anything with it, not at that distance.” Staring at her with tears in his blinking eyes, he says, “I did.” Conversation between Alis K and Willy The Informer

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking you know who you are.

The Filipino houseboy was conscious now

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

The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated.

The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself. Michel de Montaigne

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")

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.

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.

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

The Italians were getting so accustomed to tragedies and disasters that their appetite for sensation was becoming jaded.

The lighter something is, the easier it is to darken it.

Then his eye was in my mouth, a string of bloody nerves dangling from my lips. I couldn’t believe how easily it came out. Even the feel and taste of it wouldn’t have convinced me if I hadn’t been looking straight into his fountaining red socket as I listened to him scream.

The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions.

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

The rain fell like dead bullets.

The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.

There are two types of men when it comes to approaching lone pretty women in bars. The shit type and the don’t-have-the-balls-to-be-a-shit jealous type, and I was the latter and in situations like this the prey becomes the hunter and it’s all just an under-stocked meat market trading in egos, tits and shame.

The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet. Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Four, fourteen, forty - there seemed no end to them, no bottom. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guard-rail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now, endless miles above him; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is! See him down there?" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him, like avenging thunder from on high. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight. Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining. Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs suddenly ended, he'd reached bottom at last. He tore out through a square of blackness at the end of the entrance-hall, and the kindly night received him, took him to itself - along with countless other things that stalk and kill and are dangerous if crossed. He had no knowledge of where he was; if he'd ever had, he'd lost it long ago. The drums of pursuit were still beating a rolling tattoo inside the tenement. He chose a direction at random, fled down the deserted street, the wand of light from a wan street-lamp flicking him in passing, so fast did he scurry by beneath it.

There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather. There is a man with wings like a bird.. there is a man who can sea across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite. There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues..In the house above the world the over-people gather..To a fry, mad voice that whispers of earthdeath.