Johnny is dying, but he is also a killer ; his first words when Dennis finds him in the air-raid shelter are "Did i kill that man ?". It really is his guilt that cuts him off from other people - why they can't or won't help him - yet this remains strangely submerged beneath the more immediate fact of his desperate plight. His separation feels existential rather than circumstantial.
Death and the City
Imogen Sara Smith
(on Odd Man Out)
Criterion.com
2015
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Odd Man Out
1947
Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited ; for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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unknown
He lit a cigarette and looked slowly over the moving and stationary figures on the broad expanse of dock. Blue-clad porters. A few men in rather shabby looking overcoats walking about restlessly, glancing at the ship ; they looked more like money-changers or taxi-drivers than policemen he thought.
Two Faces of January
Patricia Highsmith
1964
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Patricia Highsmith
by Francis Goodman
It Always Rains on Sunday
We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another - for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
1987
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Adger Cowans
They use the expression "delayed action". I found out then what it meant. For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion. I don't know what to call it, had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place.
Rear Window
(It Had To Be Murder)
Cornell Woolrich
1942
I seen four shadows on a wall kill a guy. You know, i could never rub that out of my mind. 'Cause the guy was my old man.
Underworld USA
Sam Fuller
1961
Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a game, and it's the player that the police are inclined to see. As a rule, that's what they go after.
Pierre the Latvian
Georges Simenon
1930
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Clement Soulmagnon
New Yorker
Kiss Me Deadly
