#pen

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

#cornell-woolrich #doomed #hunted #hysteria #nightmarish

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments." [On Water] ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#government #people #punishment #retribution #revolts

They were like two poor little leaves in a storm which bore death and annihilation not only to the heads of individuals, but to whole towns and entire tribes. What hand could snatch it and save two small, defenseless children? ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#doubt #suspence #death

Without knowing it the girl was arguing on the side of the world's expert criminologists, who hold that to destroy an offender cannot benefit society so much as to redeem him. ↗

— L. Frank Baum

#death-penalty #inspiriational #redemption #death

Would you go to heaven with flesh,young foolish soul? Repent and die, a hundred percent certainty. ↗

— Michael Bassey Johnson

#heaven #repentance #death

I've spent more time playing golf than anything else the last 18 years. Just wanted to be an 80s-shooter. Got there, too. ↗

— Jack Nicholson

#else #golf #got #i #just

Her body was designed for pleasure, not speed, and Coop intended to take his time with it. ↗

— Cindy Spencer Pape

#erotica #sporting-wood #design

How long it takes to write a book depends on its length. ↗

— Walter Jon Williams

#depends #how #length #long #takes

On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT. ↗

— John Lanchester

#costs #expenses #paintings #worth #art

How can I be more important than someone else? Isn’t every life important? ↗

— Shelley K. Wall

#romance #romantic-comedy #romantic-suspense #design