Quotes by Cornell Woolrich

About Cornell Woolrich:

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully. ("Three O'Clock")

Cornell Woolrich

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just t...

Cornell Woolrich

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, or...

Cornell Woolrich

We don't 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.

Cornell Woolrich

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's 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 a...

Cornell Woolrich

I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ...

Cornell Woolrich

Keep her downstairs a minute!' I breathed desperately. I don't know why; you don't want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman. ("Nightmare")

Cornell Woolrich

It was male, of course; menace is always male. ("Nightmare")

Cornell Woolrich

It was as simple as that - they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be beautiful, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple. ("For The Rest Of Her Life")

Cornell Woolrich

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye. ("Fo...

Cornell Woolrich

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoi...

Cornell Woolrich

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 ...

Cornell Woolrich

She had said: 'You could not hate anyone that much -' She was mistaken. What did she know? She felt so good right now, this must be hate, what else could it be? ("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power. ("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.

Cornell Woolrich

Murder is such an elastic term, isn't it? ("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

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

Cornell Woolrich

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needle...

Cornell Woolrich

Evans turned away, did something with his left eyelid for the benefit of the other two. "It's got him," he smirked. "He's tuned-in from now on." Time started to slow up and act crazy. Minutes took much longer to pass than they had before. It was hard...

Cornell Woolrich

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

Cornell Woolrich

Author Bio

  • NameCornell Woolrich
  • DescriptionAmerican author and screenwriter
  • BornDecember 4, 1903
  • DiedSeptember 25, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Screenwriter