Beside her, her husband could only splutter, and he stopped even that when she half turned to flash him a smile - the instinctive, brilliant smile of a woman who knows what feeble creatures men can be...
All a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... (I'm Dangerous Tonight)
The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. (I'm Dangerous Tonight)
The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows...
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?'...
That's a man's vital spot, the helpless thing he loves. (Jane Brown's Body)
She thrust out her arms wide, in strange ritual of triumph, as Mimi Brissard had in Paris. She was a black, ominous death-cross against the starlight for a moment. Then she turned slowly, her eyes two...
Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touch...
Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reach...
I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was t...
I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.
Fear! Fear again, for the first time since his 'teens. Fear, that he thought he would never know any more. Fear that no weapon, no jeopardy, no natural cataclysm, has ever been able to inspire until n...
Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. (Jane Brown's Body)
She was beautiful, only hers was the dark beauty of night, just as Sherry's was the bright beauty of daytime. Her hair was raven-black, ending in a sort of widow's peak low on her forehead, and her fa...
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...
I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't d...
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 h...
Go to Zillicks down the block. It has three booths at the back. Go in the middle one and wait. When you lamp me turning the pages of the directory outside, shove your money in the return-coin slot and...
But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. Fo...
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)