Nightmarish Quotes

I can be anything – and nothing, and everything at the same time. It all depends on the role I am in.

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Paranoia. The more you think of an imaginary problem, the more you feel as though it’s real –

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral.