Neo Noir Quotes

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

The Bonaccorso brothers are serious muscle, though if they were any dumber they’d be dumber than rocks.

G-Men been tryin’ to snag him for years. It ain’t gonna happen. He’s smart. He’s heartless. He’s ice cold. He’s been a killer since he was twelve. He’s survived much worse than you. And, by the way, don’t think he won’t take out a few Feds if he wants to. You’re just a bunch a shitkickers to him. Who’s gonna arrest him? Huh? Cause it won’t be anyone around here. You boys need to look elsewheres for your glory and medals. That badge you got don’t mean nothin’ on these streets.

You're not done with L.A. until L.A. is done with you.

The world as we know it, cruel, dark and hopeless, have gifted us one more reason why, as a species, shoud we accept the fact that we're living in absolute ignorance. One more chunk of food for our fears and desperations. One more nightmarish and haunting thought for our dreams.

Il n'y a pas de plus profonde solitude que celle du samouraï; si ce n'est celle du tigre dans la jungle, peut-être ...

Welcome to the place on the other side of midnight.

There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it's your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world. Our options narrowing down to petty crime or minimum wage. So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us.

The closer you looked at Los Angeles, the less sense the place made. Living here was like living inside a confusing dream that threatened to plunge into a nightmare at any moment. Richie viewed LA as their salvation, but Alabama saw the truth: It wanted to consume them.

It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit. Talking to every single potential witness over and over. Pounding the pavement, as the gumshoes in Alex's neo-noir movies might say.

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

It wasn’t the first time Alabama had overdosed, but it had been the scariest. Though she would never tell Richie this, there had been a moment during the experience—impossible to say for how long; could have been a minute, could have been an hour—when she had died. At least, that’s how it had felt after she had clawed her way back from it. Death didn’t scare Alabama; in fact, sometimes, part of her yearned for it. What terrified her was how lonely she had felt, lost in oblivion. No one had greeted her at the borders of another realm, because that other realm was just another lie in a world full of them. Instead, there had been nothing at all in every direction, forever. Perfect darkness. The absence of everything.

Amos was a man without subtext. When he said he needed some time alone, it was because he needed some time alone. When Alex asked if he wanted to come watch the newly downloaded neo-noir films out of Earth that he subscribed to, the answer was always and only a response to the question. There was no sense of backbiting, no social punishment or isolation games. It just was what it was, and that was it.

What I had once thought to be a clever business name had now become a gigantic pain in my ass.

I could see the reflection of all the horrible things he was responsible for flicker across his eyes like a tv screen. He didn't have to say anything after that. I knew I was fucked.

Why did your parents name you Montana if you're from Michigan? Why did your parents name you Tripper if you're from Earth?

She was abducted by clowns once." The words flowed as coolly out of Penn's mouth as if he just said what he was going to have for lunch.

The making of Night Moves is the story of the collaboration of two artists of starkly different sensibilities – Alan Sharp the hopeless fatalist, Arthur Penn the agitating progressive. Each was just beginning to descend from his peak of cultural relevance.

Greed is the most dependable of human weaknesses.

Nobody knows Los Angeles until they’ve been entranced by it, corrupted by it, cast out from it, and returned to it on their knees begging it to save them, and Richie knew Los Angeles. He knew it better than anyone. This time he would tame the beast and make it his own—this time he would win.

How many diners should a man rob before he turns the gun on himself? The question whispered in Richie’s ear as he swallowed the last bite of pancake. He and Alabama had gotten the idea of stealing from diners when they caught Pulp Fiction at a four-year anniversary screening in the New Beverly Cinema in LA last year where they’d gone to shoot dope and drift among the neon haze of Hollywood glitz, thinking Shit, look how in love they are holding up that diner, that could be us. But a dozen diners later the charm had worn off and they’d returned to being just a couple junkie losers stuck in the small-time.

The needle plunged into Richie’s skin like a lover. “I’ll be right behind you,” he heard Alabama say, but his blood was cold now and his eyes were open but unseeing and a warmth was spreading up his bones from his toes as all tension in his body melted and seeped out his pores, all worries and fears and failures, and he knew that everything would be fine, perfectly, wonderfully fine, and that it had been silly to have ever worried at all. I’ll be right behind you. The words repeating in his mind like an echo as he zoomed far away from this dirty motel room, from this dirty life. See you soon.

Appearing in neo noir, erotic thrillers, teen dramas, supernatural science fiction and horror and retro noir, the bisexually active femme fatale appears to be everywhere,

Something was off. Everything was off. Eddie could feel it. Felt it ever since he woke up this morning, in fact, that sense of something, everything, being . . . off. Not that anything had been right to begin with. Fucking season was off, that was for sure.

Los Angeles was black, full dark no stars, hills everywhere. There were long stretches of road and sidewalks, on either side neon signs, overhead street-lamps, standing in protest to the overwhelming blackness of the night. The town's lighting seemed powerless against it. Houses were darkened, some hidden on back roads, behind gates and walled gardens. No one seemed to walk anywhere at night. And yet, the city seemed alive. Not like New York, not like a live wire, a town hopped up on electricity. Los Angeles was different, like a cobra in the grass, creeping, coiling onto itself in the night...

The Stormcrow City is just a big meat grinder; People get in on one end, and comes out on another. We're just turning the handle.

We're a newspaper. A dying breed of media. Hell, we're already dead, we just don't know it. But we keep coming to work. You know why? Because it's in our blood. To tell the world what's going on. To keep them woke. It's our job to protect this world...

In Los Angeles everybody wears a mask, telling stories that aren't quite the truth but aren't quite a lie. The warm weather makes it easy to stay. The strange thing is: you can feel your soul being bought and sold, little by little, piece by piece. You feel it dying, being taken away from you, dripping out of you. Especially at night, when it's a dark, starless sky. Night as you know it, and night as we know it...here...are two different things.

The Chateau Marmont Hotel sat on a rise and looked like something constructed in the heyday of Los Angeles, back when there was such a thing as Hollywoodland. It was a regal, but spooky castle-like structure filled with ghosts, and the ghosts of parties long gone. It was as if the hotel was a living, breathing entity that had claimed its fair share of souls.

Sometimes a man celebrates his birthday with a large party, girls, food, too much drink. And sometimes a man celebrates his birthday by thinking deep thoughts. Who's to say which one is right.