Quotes by Cornell Woolrich

Hes prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. Theres a shiny streak down one side of his face. I shouldnt have let her go ahead - I ought to be hung! Somethings gone wrong. I cant stand this any more! he says with a choked sound. Im starting now -But how are you -Spring for it and fire as I go if they try to stop me. And then as he barges out, the fat lady waddling solicitously after him, Stay there; take it if she calls - tell her Im on the way-He plunges straight at the street-door from all the way back in the hall, like a fullback headed for a touchdown. Thats the best way. Gun bedded in his pocket, but hand gripping it ready to let fly through lining and all. He slaps the door out of his way without slowing and skitters out along the building, head and shoulders defensively lowered.It *was* the taxi, you bet. No sound from it, at least not at this distance, just a thin bluish haze slowly spreading out around it that might be gas-fumes if its engine were turning; and at his end a long row of un-colored spurts - of dust and stone-splinters - following him along the wall of the flat hes tearing away from. Each succeeding one a half yard too far behind him, smacking into where he was a second ago. And they never catch up. (Jane Browns Body)

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar-butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didnt own a car. And it wouldnt be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford. She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man, Stapp, he didnt bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. Thats a dangerous kind of a man.If he had been honest with himself, he would have had to admit that this mysterious afternoon caller was just the excuse he gave himself, that hed daydreamed of getting rid of her long before there was any reason to, that there had been something in him for years past now urging Kill, kill, kill. Maybe ever since that time hed been treated at the hospital for a concussion.(Three OClock)

And hes alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy hes never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call it - and he cant. Somethings bothering him to keep him awake. (Jane Browns Body)

The struggle doesnt last long; its too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; its easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeers collar.Tereshko is trembling with his anger. Now him again! he protests, as though at an injustice. All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! Whatsa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, dont kick at him, thatll never do it - I think the guy has nine lives! (Jane Browns 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.Youd better come out now, times up, a flat, deadly voice said. Theyre calling your train, but youre 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 mans 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 hadnt 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. Youre being arrested for putting slugs in that phone. It wont 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 stations 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)

She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.

I didnt look over my shoulder; there wasnt a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told me. Little needles of warning that gathered at the back of my skull told me. Id never known until then that the jungles arent so very far behind us, after all, and tails, and four feet instead of two. Where else did those symptoms come from?(Dont Wait Up For Me, Tonight)

Its hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. Its harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

But there are three things in this world you can’t shrug off: death, taxes – and a girl who loves you.

But it doesnt happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.(New York Blues)

I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor. She was already in the never-never land where ghouls like her belonged. I covered her face with one of the pillows, pressed down upon it with the weight of my whole body, held it there until she should have been dead ten times over. Yet when I removed the pillow to look, the black of strangulation was missing from her face. She was still in that state of suspended animation that defied me, a taunting smile visible about her lips.I had a gun in my valise, from years before when Id been on an engineering job in the jungles of Ecuador. I got it out, looked it over. It was still in good working order, although it only had one bullet left in it. That one would be enough. She wasnt going to escape me! I pressed the muzzle to her smooth white forehead, mid-center. Die, damn you! I growled, and pulled the trigger back. It exploded with a crash. A film of smoke hid her face from me for a minute. When it had cleared again, I looked.There was no bullet-hole in her skull!A black powder-smudge marked the point of contact. The gun dropped to the floor with a thud. That ineradicable smile still glimmered up at me, as if to say: You see? You cant. I rubbed my finger over the black; the skin was unbroken underneath. A blank cartridge, that must have been it. I raised her head; there was a rent in the sheet under it. I probed through it with two fingers. I could feel the bullet lying imbedded down in the stuffing of the mattress.(Vampires Honeymoon)

She was beautiful, only hers was the dark beauty of night, just as Sherrys was the bright beauty of daytime. Her hair was raven-black, ending in a sort of widows 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 arms were in motion.Her lips were a red gash in the pallor of her face, and they glistened as though she had daubed them with fresh blood instead of rouge.Whats your name? I asked.Call me Faustine, she said low. I saw her staring fixedly at me, with a sort of half-smile on her face, but her gaze rested a little lower than my own face. I fingered my neck uneasily. Is there something on my collar?(Vampires Honeymoon)

Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. (Jane Browns Body)

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if hed been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didnt have a solitary coin on him; hed have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that Id been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasnt obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless youve got plenty of small change.(Dont Wait Up For Me, Tonight)

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a mans life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.(New York Blues)

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. (The Moon of Montezuma)

The shears found his throat this time. He fell down on top of them and was silent.Something dark like mucilage glistened where he lay.She had jumped back - not in remorse, but to keep the bottom of her skirt clear of his blood. (Im Dangerous Tonight)

And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill. (The Moon Of Montezuma)

How simple death without weapons was. How safe for the killer.(Mind Over Murder)

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 has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the worlds teeming billions! (Jane Browns Body)