The portieres were drawn across the French windows now, veiling the stars outside – that were there nevertheless. (“Speak To Me Of Death”)
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”)
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”)
That’s a man’s vital spot, the helpless thing he loves. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)
It was male, of course; menace is always male. (“Nightmare”)
Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don’t you’re a fool. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)
Maldonado’s face was ghastly. ‘That’ she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, ‘and that’ – pointing to what lay on the floor – ‘prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?’ (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)
Being broke didn’t seem so awful as it had yesterday, being broke but being at peace with the world.(“Don’t Wait Up For Me Tonight”)
You’d be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you’ve never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. (“Dusk To Dawn”)
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”)
…all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean – or dirty… (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)
Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all (“Steps Going Up” aka “Guillotine” aka “Men Must Die”)
She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.
But there are three things in this world you can’t shrug off: death, taxes – and a girl who loves you.
Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)
What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.(“New York Blues”)
And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill. (“The Moon Of Montezuma”)
How simple death without weapons was. How safe for the killer.(“Mind Over Murder”)
It’s six o’clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark – three-quarters down not three-quarters up – and the night begins.(“New York Blues”)
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.
It wasn’t an attack. We’d 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”)
Men’s loyalty to their women dies hard – and almost always too late. (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)
A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.(“Three O’Clock”)
But that’s the Way, and there is no other. And once his mind’s made up, the trembling and aimless walking stops, and he can look doom in the face without flinching. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)
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”)
New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.(“New York Blues”)
The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)
She was ready to be a fugitive with him for the rest of her life – ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people’ – and when a Parisienne is ready to leave Paris behind forever, that’s something. (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)