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Quote by Steven Magee

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Steven Magee

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“Are you the owner of this car?" A cop has something you don't have, something you gave him earlier. "No, I'm just delivering it to Oklahoma City for a lady. " "Do you have plates for this car?" A cop needn't be vicious, but he can be so, safely. "Just those stickers." "Do you have the registration?" Presidents and premiers can annihilate millions, but only a cop can explain away your solitary murder.”

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Book:Wall to Wall
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“In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")”

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Book:Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
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“JJ glared at his slumbering frame. Long legs, lethal in denim, his button fly already enticingly popped, abdomen all ridged and naked, begging for a finger or a tongue to discover the hills and valleys, dark shaggy hair spread around his head like a freaking halo on her pillow. Well too damn bad for this broken-down angel. She was the one who’d worked her ass off until two am. Not him. And she wanted her bed back.”

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Book:Some Girls Lie
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“Civilians had no idea how much nonsense you had to listen to when you were a cop. The public loved to salute police officers for their bravery, but no one ever gave credit for the day-in, day-out fortitude required to put up with the bullshit. While courage was an excellent feature in a police officer, a built-in resistance to gibberish was, in Lila's opinion, just as important.”

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Book:Sleeping Beauties
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“Bow not, my brave officer of the law, before the soul-crunching pressure of corruption - light up the nuclear furnace of responsibility and justice that sleeps dormant within you and crush all corruption to ashes - only then you'll become the very embodiment of courage, conscience and order in the human society.”

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Book:Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law
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