Rear Window quotes

View Quote Lisa: [referring to the composer's music] It's enchanting. It's almost as if it were being written especially for us.
Jeff: No wonder he's having so much trouble with it.
Lisa: At least you can't say the dinner isn't right.
Jeff: Lisa, it's perfect, as always.

View Quote Lisa: If you're saying all this because you don't want to tell me the truth, because you're hiding something from me, then maybe I can understand.
Jeff: I'm not hiding anything! It's just that...
Lisa: It doesn't make sense! What's so different about it here from over there, or any place you go, that one person couldn't live in both places just as easily?
Jeff: Some people can. Now if you'll just let me explain...
Lisa: What is it but traveling from one place to another taking pictures? It's just like being a tourist on an endless vacation.
Jeff: OK. Now that's your opinion. You're entitled to it. Now let me give you my side...
Lisa: It's ridiculous to say that it can only be done by a special, private little group of annointed people...
Jeff: I made a simple statement, a true statement, but I can back it up if you'll just shut up for a minute!
Lisa: If your opinion is as rude as your manner, I don't think I care to hear it.
Jeff: Oh, come on now, simmer down.
Lisa: You - I can't fit in here - you can't fit in there. I mean, according to you, people should be born, live and die on the same spot.
Jeff: SHUT UP! Did you ever eat fish heads in rice?
Lisa: Of course not.
Jeff: Well, you might have to if you went with me. Did you ever try to keep warm on a C-54 at 15,000 feet, 20 degrees below zero?
Lisa: Oh, I do it all the time. Whenever I have a few minutes after lunch.
Jeff: Did you ever get shot at? Did you ever get run over? Did you ever get sandbagged at night because somebody got unfavorable publicity from your camera? Did you ever...those high-heels, they'll be great in the jungle and the nylons and those six ounce lingerie...
Lisa: Three!
Jeff: All right. Three! They'll make a big hit in Finland just before you freeze to death?
Lisa: Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Well try and find a raincoat in Brazil, even when it isn't raining. Lisa. In this job, you carry one suitcase, your home is the available transportation. You don't sleep very much, you bathe less, and sometimes the food that you eat is made from things that you couldn't even look at when they're alive.
Lisa: Jeff, you don't have to be deliberately repulsive just to impress me I'm wrong.
Jeff: Deliberately repulsive! I'm just trying to make it sound good. You just have to face it, Lisa, you're not meant for that kind of a life. Few people are.
Lisa: You're too stubborn to argue with.
Jeff: I'm not stubborn - I'm just truthful.
Lisa: I know, a lesser man would have told me it was one long holiday - and I would have been awakened to a rude disillusionment.
Jeff: Oh, well now, wait a minute. Now wait a minute. If you want to get vicious on this, I'll be very happy to accommodate you.
Lisa: No, I don't particularly want that. [She rises and moves away.] So that's it. You won't stay here and I can't go with you.
Jeff: It would be the wrong thing.
Lisa: You don't think either one of us could ever change?
Jeff: Right now, it doesn't seem so.
Lisa: I'm in love with you. I don't care what you do for a living. I'd just like to be part of it somehow. It's deflating to find out the only way I can be part of it is to take out a subscription to your magazine. I guess I'm not the girl I thought I was.
Jeff: There's nothing wrong with you, Lisa. You've got this town in the palm of your hand.
Lisa: Not quite it seems. Goodbye, Jeff.
Jeff: You mean, 'Good night.'
Lisa: I mean what I said.
Jeff: Well, Lisa, couldn't we just, uh, couldn't we just keep things status quo?
Lisa: Without any future?
Jeff: Well, when am I gonna see you again?
Lisa: Not for a long time...at least not until tomorrow night.

View Quote Lisa: Where does a girl have to go before you notice her ?
Jeff: Well if she's pretty enough, she doesn't have to go anywhere. She just has to be.
Lisa: Well, ain't I? Pay attention to me.
Jeff: Well, I'm, I'm not exactly on the other side of the room.
Lisa: Your mind is. When I want a man, I want all of you.

View Quote Jeff: Don't, don't you ever have any problems?
Lisa: I have one now.
Jeff: So do I.
Lisa: Tell me about it.
Jeff: Why, why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?
Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home.
Jeff: Oh no. No, no, no. Not this salesman's wife. And why didn't he go to work today?
Lisa: Homework. It's more interesting.
Jeff: What's interesting about a butcher knife and a small saw wrapped in newspaper? Huh?
Lisa: Nothing, thank heaven.
Jeff: Why hasn't he been in his wife's bedroom all day?
Lisa: I wouldn't dare answer that.
Jeff: Well, listen. I'll answer it, Lisa, there's something terribly wrong.
Lisa: And I'm afraid it's with me.
Jeff: What do you think?
Lisa: Something too frightful to utter.
Jeff: He went out a few minutes ago in his undershirt. He hasn't come back yet. That would be a terrible job to tackle. Just how would you start to cut up a human body?
Lisa: Jeff, I'll be honest with you. You're beginning to scare me a little.

View Quote Lisa: Jeff, if you could only see yourself!
Jeff: Whatsa matter?
Lisa: Sitting around looking out of the window to kill time is one thing but doing it the way you are with binoculars and wild opinions about every little thing you see is, is diseased!
Jeff: What do you think I consider it - recreation?
Lisa: I don't know what you consider it, but if you don't stop it, I'm getting out of here...What is it you're looking for?

View Quote Jeff: I've seen it through that window. I've seen bickering and family quarrels and mysterious trips at night, knives and saws and ropes, and now since last evening, not a sign of the wife. All right, now you tell me where she is...
Lisa: Maybe he's leaving his wife, I don't know, I don't care. Lots of people have knives and saws and ropes around their houses and lots of men don't speak to their wives all day. Lots of wives nag and men hate them and trouble starts. But very very few of them end up in murder if that's what you're thinking.
Jeff: It's pretty hard for you to keep away from that word isn't it?
Lisa: You could see all that he did, couldn't you?
Jeff: Of course, I...
Lisa: You could see because the shades were up and, and he walked along the corridor and the street and the back yard. Oh Jeff, do you think a murderer would let you see all that? That he wouldn't pull the shades down and hide behind them?
Jeff: Just where he's being clever. He's being nonchalant about things...
Lisa: Oh, and that's where you're not being clever. A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.
Jeff: Why not?
Lisa: [pointing to the newlyweds' window] Why, for all you know, there's probably something a lot more sinister going on behind those windows.
Jeff: Where? Oh, no comment.

View Quote Tom: Didn't see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder?
Jeff: Because everything this fella's done has been suspicious. Trips at night in the rain, and knives and saws and trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn't there anymore.
Tom: I admit it all has a mysterious sound. Could be any number of things - murder's the least possible.
Jeff: Well, don't tell me he's an unemployed magician amusing the neighborhood with his sleight-of-hand. Now don't tell me that.
Tom: It's too obvious, a stupid way to commit murder in full view of fifty windows? Then sit over there smoking a cigar, waiting for the police to come and pick him up?
Jeff: Officer, go do your duty. Go pick him up!
Tom: Jeff, you've got a lot to learn about homicide. Why, morons have committed murder so shrewdly it's taken a hundred trained police minds to catch them. That salesman wouldn't just knock his wife off after dinner and toss her in the trunk and put her in storage.
Jeff: I'll bet it's been done.
Tom: Most everything's been done - under PANIC. This is a thousand to one shot. He's still sitting around the apartment. That man's not panicked.
Jeff: You think I made all this up, huh?

View Quote Jeff: What do you need? Bloody footsteps leading up to the door?
Tom: One thing I don't need is heckling.

View Quote Lisa: It doesn't make sense to me...Women aren't that unpredictable...A woman has a favorite handbag and it always hangs on her bedpost where she can get at it easily. And then all of a sudden, she goes away on a trip and leaves it behind. Why?
Jeff: Because she didn't know she was going on a trip. And where she's going she wouldn't need the handbag.
Lisa: Yes, but only her husband would know that. And that jewelry. Women don't keep their jewelry in a purse, getting all twisted and scratched and tangled up.
Jeff: Well, do they hide it in their husbands' clothes?
Lisa: They do not. And they don't leave it behind either. Why, a woman going anywhere but the hospital would always take makeup, perfume, and jewelry...That's basic equipment. And you don't leave it behind in your husband's drawer in your favorite handbag.

View Quote Lisa: We have all night...I'm going to stay with you.
Jeff: Well, you'll have to clear that with my landlord.
Lisa: I have the whole weekend off.
Jeff: Well, that's very nice, but I just have one bed.
Lisa: If you say anything else, I'll stay tomorrow night, too.
Jeff: I won't be able to give you any pajamas.
...
Lisa: You said I'll have to live out of one suitcase. I'll bet yours isn't this small?
Jeff: This is a suitcase?
Lisa: Well, a Mark Cross overnight case anyway. Compact, but, uh, ample enough. [She pulls her frilly lingerie from inside.]]
Jeff: Looks like you packed in a hurry. Look at this. Isn't that amazing?
Lisa: I'll trade you. My feminine intuition for a bed for the night.
Jeff: I'll go along with that.

View Quote Lisa: [Listening to the composer play his piano] Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that? It's utterly beautiful. Wish I could be creative.
Jeff: Oh sweetie, you are. You have a great talent for creating difficult situations.
Lisa: I do?
Jeff: Sure. Staying here all night, uninvited.
Lisa: Surprise is the most important element of attack. And besides, you're not up on your private eye literature. When they're in trouble, it's always their Girl Friday who gets them out of it.
Jeff: Well, is she the girl that saves him from the clutches of the seductive showgirls and the overpassionate daughters of the rich?
Lisa: The same.
Jeff: That's the one, huh? It's funny, he never ends up marrying her, does he, huh? That's strange.
Lisa: Weird. Why don't I slip into something more comfortable?
Jeff: By all means.
Lisa: I mean, like the kitchen and make us some coffee.
Jeff: Oh, with some brandy too, huh?

View Quote Tom: Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.
Jeff: You mean to say you can explain everything that's gone on over there and is still going on?
Tom: No, and neither can you. That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn't possibly explain in public.
Lisa: Like disposing of their wives.
Tom: Get that idea out of your mind. It will only lead in the wrong direction.
Jeff: What about the knife and the saw?
Tom: Did you ever own a saw?
Jeff: At home in the garage, I had...
Tom: How many people did you cut up with it? Or with the couple of hundred knives you probably owned in your life? Your logic is backward.
Lisa: You can't ignore the wife disappearing and the trunk and the jewelry.
Tom: I checked the railroad station. He bought a ticket. Ten minutes later, he put his wife on the train. Destination? Meritsville. The witnesses are that deep.
Lisa: That might have been a woman, but it couldn't have been Mrs. Thorwald. That jewelry...
Tom: Look, Miss Fremont. That uh, feminine intuition stuff sells magazines but in real life, it's still a fairy tale. I don't know how many wasted years I've spent tracking down leads based on female intuition.

View Quote Jeff: You know, much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit, he might have gotten ahold of something when he said that was pretty private stuff going on out there. I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you, do you suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he didn't commit a crime?
Lisa: I'm not much on rear-window ethics.
Jeff: Of course, they can do the same thing to me. Watch me like a bug under a glass if they want to.
Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see.
Jeff: What?
Lisa: You and me with long faces, plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known. You'd think we could be a little bit happier that the poor woman is alive and well. Whatever happened to that old saying: 'Love thy neighbor'?
Jeff: You know, I think I'll start reviving that tomorrow. I'll begin with 'Miss Torso.'
Lisa: Not if I have to move in to an apartment across the way and do the Dance of the Seven Veils every hour. [She lowers the blinds] The show's over for tonight. [She picks up her overnight kit of lingerie] Preview of coming attractions.

View Quote Lisa: [Wearing her negligee] What do you think? [Jeff is speechless.] I will rephrase the question.
Jeff: Thank you.
Lisa: Do you like it?
Jeff: Yes, I like it.

View Quote Stella: Musta splattered alot. Well why not, that's what we're all thinkin'. He killed her in there. He has to clean up those stains before he leaves.
Lisa: Oh Stella, your choice of words.
Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.