Quotes by Cornell Woolrich

Now the evenings at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and theres a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in.The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Dannys and Lindys - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and thats home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: New York, New York, its a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Batterys down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground.Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and its a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carsons face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. Theres a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. Its an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as its ever going to get.This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys nerves get tauter and womens fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the Late Show title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, Theres a life thats happening here.(New York Blues)

Its six oclock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins.(New York Blues)

A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.An illuminated road sign flashes by: CAUTION! MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. (Jane Browns Body)

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. (The Moon Of Montezuma)

After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt.They stood him up, his back to the well.In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy. (The Numbers Up)

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 fell in. (The Moon Of Montezuma)

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)

Three oclock in the morning.The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short. (Jane Browns Body)

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 didnt 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)

One of them hasnt got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.(New York Blues)

We dont marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again.How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.

It wasnt an attack. Wed been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.(New York Blues)

OShaughnessy 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. OShaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow. (Jane Browns Body)

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. Youre doing something to me that I wouldnt do to a dog, I mumbled. What youre doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. Youre locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. Youre taking my mind away from me. Youre condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It wont happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess thats that.I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeants desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.(All At Once, No Alice)

Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. So thats what its like! he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it.The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasnt afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.Next he went through his pockets, thinking hed be helping to identify him.The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; hed left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show hed paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life - death - was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt. (Dusk To Dawn)

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)

Mens loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. (Im Dangerous Tonight)

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.(Three OClock)

Shes a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic - you cant take your eyes off her. Shes dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesnt walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word. (Kiss Of The Cobra)

When she comes down to supper I dont like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. Shes put on a shiny dress, all fishscales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head shes put a sort of beaded cap that fits close-like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you cant tell whether shes a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, theres a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You cant be sure what it is, but its shaped like a question mark. (Kiss of the Cobra)