Rear Window Quotes

“The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out—everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We’re going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Something sparked in the darkness of one of his own windows where he’d been just now, and a shot thudded heavily out around the-quadrangle-enclosure like a big bass drum.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“I proceeded to breathe adenoidally, like someone in heavy upright sleep. It wasn’t hard. My own breath was coming nearly that labored anyway, from tension.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Suddenly, death was somewhere inside the house here with me.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Then suddenly it exploded. Why at this particular moment, I don’t know. That was some mystery of the inner workings of my own mind. It flashed like waiting gunpowder which a spark has finally reached along a slow train. Drove all thoughts of Sam, and the front door, and this and that completely out of my head. It had been waiting there since midafternoon today, and only now——More of that delayed action. Damn that delayed action.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Something about it struck me as different from any of the others I’d seen him give in all the time I’d been watching him. If you can qualify such an elusive thing as a glance, I would have termed it a glance with a purpose. It was certainly anything but vacant or random, it had a bright spark of fixity in it.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“It sank into my subconscious, to ferment there like yeast, while I went back to the main problem at hand.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Two minds with but one thought, turned inside-out in my case. How to keep it hidden, how to see that it wasn’t kept hidden.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“He toppled into a chair and snatched up a drink. Out of the bottle neck itself this time. And even while he was holding it to his lips, his head was turned looking over his shoulder at the door that had suddenly thrown his secret in his face.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“He’s got his armor on against them. But his back is naked and unprotected against me.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Sam was standing there looking over at me from the pantryway. He said accusingly: “You ain’t touched a thing. And your face looks like a sheet.” It felt like one. It had that needling feeling, when the blood has left it involuntarily.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“They use the expression “delayed action.” I found out then what it meant. For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion, I don’t know what to call it, had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“That was the second time in one evening I’d seen him do that. And once at daybreak, made three times altogether. I smiled mentally. You’d almost think he felt guilty about something. It was probably nothing, just an odd little habit, a quirk, that he didn’t know he had himself. I had them myself, everyone does.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Why is he so interested in other people’s windows, I wondered detachedly. And of course an effective brake to dwell on that thought too lingeringly clamped down almost at once: Look who’s talking. What about you yourself?”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“And now his attitude was the proper one for inner preoccupation. He stood there looking downward at nothing, lost in thought.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“She didn’t come out to greet him. The first link, of the so-strong chain of habits, of custom, that binds us all, had snapped wide open.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“He was holding a cigarette in his hand. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell it was that by the quick, nervous little jerks with which he kept putting his hand to his mouth, and the haze I saw rising around his head.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“There was a woman living there with her child, a young widow I suppose. I’d see her put the child to bed, and then bend over and kiss her in a wistful sort of way. She’d shade the light off her and sit there painting her eyes and mouth. Then she’d go out. She’d never come back till the night was nearly spent. Once I was still up, and I looked and she was sitting there motionless with her head buried in her arms. Something about it, it used to make me a little sad.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“Murder. It’s one of the most unspeakable acts a human can commit.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window

“I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities....

The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free....

The first link, of the so-strong chain of habits, of custom, that binds us all, had snapped wide open.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window