Best 155 quotes in «noir quotes» category

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.

No whiskey, no religion, nothing.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

The Filipino houseboy was conscious now

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

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

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

The rain fell like dead bullets.

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.

There’s no tragedy you can’t profit from.

There was, I thought, something calling to me from out in the dark. It came from out in the tempest, even from the lights of the fishing boats a mile out at sea. You can be called to a last effort, a final heroic statement, because I doubt you call yourself to leave comforts and certainties for an open road. But the call is inside your own head. It's a sad summons from the depths of your own wasted past. You could call it the imperative to go out with full-tilt trumpets and gunshots instead of the quietly desperate sound of the hospital ventilator. Victory instead of defeat.

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")

The woman felt healed. This stranger understood her. He knew, on a personal level, everything she was going through. And he was asking her to stay alive. Because of him, her angry feelings melted away. She wanted to live again.

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…

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.