107 Quotes by Cornell Woolrich

All guys are scared of each other, didn’t you know that? I’m not the only one. We’re all born afraid.

No doubt about it. We’ve made a preliminary examination, and I don’t even think we’ll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anything else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn’t been for them he’d have been a goner long before he was picked up.” This went over my head at the time. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital’s.

Evans made himself their spokesman. “Charlie and Joe,” he offered. “Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time.” Girls evidently didn’t count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.

The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky, like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, while-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. “I’m all set now,” he thought. “I’m young. I’ve got love. I’ve got a clear track. The rest is a cinch.

We said a lot of things; we said nothing.

To be worshiped, though I didn’t realize it at the moment, is a far more dangerous situation to be in than simply to be desired.

Something deep within him, what it was he had no leisure nor skill to recognize, seemed to retreat down long dim corridors away from the doom that impeded. He hadn’t known he had those convenient corridors of evasion in him, with their protective turns and angles by which to put distance between himself and menace. Oh clever architect of the Mind, oh merciful blueprints that made such emergency exits available.

Take it easy,” he jeered, “relax. I used to be a sailor. You’ll never get out of them knots, buddy.