Rear Window quotes

View Quote Jeff: No, she's just not the girl for me.
Stella: Yeah, she's only perfect.
Jeff: She's too perfect. She's too talented, she's too beautiful. She's too sophisticated. She's too everything but what I want.
Stella: Is, um, what you want something you can discuss?
Jeff: Well, it's very simple, Stella. She belongs to that rarified atmosphere of Park Avenue, you know. Expensive restaurants, literary ****tail parties...Can you imagine her tramping around the world with a camera bum who never has more than a week's salary in the bank? If she was only ordinary.
Stella: You ever gonna get married?
Jeff: I'll probably get married one of these days, and when I do, it's gonna be to someone who thinks of life not just as a new dress, and a lobster dinner, the latest scandal. I need a woman who's willing...to go anywhere and do anything and love it. So the honest thing for me to do is just to call the whole thing off and let her find somebody else.
Stella: Yeah, I can hear you now. Get out of my life. You're a perfectly wonderful woman - you're too good for me. Look, Mr. Jefferies, I'm not an educated woman, but I can tell you one thing. When a man and a woman see each other and like each other, they ought to come together - wham! Like a couple of taxis on Broadway, not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle.
Jeff: There's an intelligent way to approach marriage.
Stella: Intelligence! Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence. Hah! Modern marriage!
Jeff: Now, we've progressed emotionally.
Stella: Baloney! Once, it was see somebody, get excited, get married. Now, it's read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words, psychoanalyze each other until you can't tell the difference between a petting party and a civil service exam.
Jeff: People have different emotional levels.
Stella: When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it.
Jeff: Well, that's fine, Stella. Now would you fix me a sandwich please?
Stella: Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread. Lisa's loaded to her fingertips with love for you - I got two words of advice for you - Marry her!
Jeff: Did she pay you much?

View Quote [regarding Thorwald] That's no ordinary look. That's the kind of a look a man gives when he's afraid somebody might be watching him.

View Quote It's opening night of the last depressing week of L. B. Jefferies in a cast.

View Quote I'm going to make this a week you'll never forget.

View Quote The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house...They got no windows in the work house. You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those bikini bombshells you're always watchin' worth a red-hot poker? Oh dear, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes, sir. How's that for a bit of home-spun philosophy?

View Quote The insurance company would be much happier if you'd sleep in bed at night instead of in that wheelchair...Your eyes are all bloodshot. You must have been watching out that window for hours.

View Quote Just where do you suppose he cut her up? 'Course, the bathtub! That's the only place where he could have washed away the blood. He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak.

View Quote Wife living above Thorwalds: Which one of you did it? Which one of you killed my dog? You don't know the meaning of the word 'neighbor.' Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies, but none of you do. But I couldn't imagine any of you bein' so low that you'd kill a little helpless, friendly dog - the only thing in this whole neighborhood who liked anybody. Did ya kill him because he liked ya? Just because he liked ya?

View Quote Jeff: You've got to get me out of here. Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors. ..If you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I'm gonna do something drastic...like what? I'm gonna get married and then I'll never be able to go anywhere.
Editor: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome, bitter old man.
Jeff: Yeah, can't you just see me, rushin' home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher and the garbage disposal, the nagging wife.
Editor: Jeff, wives don't nag, they discuss.
Jeff: Is that so, that so? Maybe in the high rent district they discuss, in my neighborhood they still nag.
Editor: Well, um, you know best.

View Quote Stella: I was nursing a director of General Motors ... When General Motors has to go to the bathroom 10 times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.
Jeff: In economics, a kidney ailment has nothing whatsoever to do with the stock market.

View Quote Stella: You've got a hormone deficiency.
Jeff: How can you tell from a thermometer ?
Stella: Those bathing beauties you've been watching haven't raised your temperature one degree in a month.

View Quote Stella: I got a nose for trouble. I can smell it ten miles away...I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg. Then you get to lookin' out the window. See things you shouldn't see. Trouble. I can see you in court now, surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits. You're pleading: 'Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun. I love my neighbors like a father.' And the Judge says, 'Well, congratulations, you've just given birth to three years in...'
Jeff: Yeah, right now I'd welcome trouble...You know, I think you're right. I think there is going to be trouble around here.
Stella: ...What kind of trouble?
Jeff: Lisa Fremont.
Stella: Are you kidding? She's a beautiful young girl and you're a reasonably healthy young man.
Jeff: She expects me to marry her.
Stella: That's normal.
Jeff: I don't want to.
Stella: That's abnormal.
Jeff: I'm just not ready for marriage.
Stella: Every man's ready for marriage when the right girl comes along. And Lisa Fremont is the right girl for any man with half a brain who can get one eye open.
Jeff: Oh, she's all right.
Stella: What did you do? Have a fight?
Jeff: No.
Stella: Her father loading up the shotgun?
Jeff: What? Please, Stella.
Stella: It's happened before you know. Some of the world's happiest marriages have, uh, started under the gun, as you might say.

View Quote Lisa: Reading from top to bottom: [She turns on one lamp light.] Lisa. [She turns on a second lamp.] Carol. [She turns on a third lamp.] Fremont.
Jeff: Is this the Lisa Fremont who never wears the same dress twice?
Lisa: Only because it's expected of her. It's right off the Paris plane. You think it will sell?...A steal at $1,100 dollars.
Jeff: Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the Stock Exchange.

View Quote Lisa: Someday you may want to open up a studio of your own here.
Jeff: How would I run it, from say, Pakistan?
Lisa: Jeff, isn't it time you came home? You could pick your assignment.
Jeff: Well, I wish there was one I wanted.
Lisa: Make the one you want.
Jeff: You mean leave the magazine?
Lisa: Yes.
Jeff: For what?
Lisa: For yourself and me. I could get you a dozen assignments tomorrow - fashions, portraits. Well now, don't laugh, I could do it.
Jeff: That's what I'm afraid of. Can you see me driving down to the fashion salon in a jeep wearing combat boots and a three-day beard? Will that make a hit?
Lisa: I could see you looking very handsome and successful in a dark blue flannel suit.
Jeff: Let's stop talking nonsense, shall we, hmm?

View Quote Jeff: 'Miss Lonelyhearts.' Well, at least that's something you'll never have to worry about.
Lisa: Oh? You can see my apartment from here, all the way up on 63rd Street?
Jeff: No, not exactly...but we have a little apartment here that's probably about as popular as yours. You remember of course 'Miss Torso,' the ballet dancer. She's like a Queen Bee with her pick of the drones.
Lisa: I'd say she's doing a woman's hardest job - Juggling Wolves.
Jeff: [watching 'Miss Torso' briefly kiss one of the men on the balcony] She picked the most prosperous-looking one.
Lisa: She's not in love with him or any of them.
Jeff: How can you tell that from here?
Lisa: You said it resembled my apartment, didn't you?