17 Quotes Tagged: noir

I wasn’t doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

I was a licensed investigator who knocked off somebody who needed knocking off bad and he couldn’t get to me. So I was a murderer by definition and all the law could do was shake its finger.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

It's raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or Boy Kings. I like that.

It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

They were going to die slower and harder than any son of a bitch had ever died before, and while they died I'd laugh my god-damn head off!

His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.

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.

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.

Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.”

“I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.