Memorable quotes for
Rear Window (1954) More at IMDbPro »

Stella: When two people love each other, they come together - WHAM - like two taxis on Broadway.

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Lisa: How's your leg?
Jeff: Hurts a little.
Lisa: Your stomach?
Jeff: Empty as a football.
Lisa: And your love life?
Jeff: Not too active.
Lisa: Anything else bothering you?
Jeff: Uh-huh, who are you?

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Jeff: She wants me to marry her.
Stella: That's normal.
Jeff: I don't want to.
Stella: That's abnormal.

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Lisa: Today's a very special day.
Jeff: It's just another run-of-the-mill Wednesday. The calendar's full of 'em.

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Jeff: When am I going to see you again?
Lisa: [angry] Not for a long time...
[softening]
Lisa: at least not until tomorrow night.

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Jeff: 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.

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Lisa: I wish I were creative.
Jeff: You are. You're great at creating difficult situations.

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Jeff: He killed a dog last night because the dog was scratching around in the garden. You know why? Because he had something buried in that garden that the dog scented.
Lt. Doyle: Like an old hambone?
Jeff: I don't know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife.

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Stella: Let's go down there and find out what's burried in that garden.
Lisa: Why not? I've always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald.

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Lisa: The last thing Mrs. Thorwald would leave behind would be her wedding ring. Stella, do you ever leave yours at home?
Stella: The only way somebody would get that would be to chop off my - finger. Let's go down to the garden and find out what's buried there.
Lisa: Why not? I always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald.

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Jeff: Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they're shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow *shorter* over the course of two weeks? Something's buried there.
Lisa: Mrs. Thorwald!
Stella: You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? It's impossible that he could bury Mrs. Thorwald in a hole the size of one square foot. Unless he buried her standing on end, in which case he wouldn't need the knives and saws.

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Lt. Doyle: How do you do?
Lisa: We think Thorwald's guilty.

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Lisa: A woman never goes anywhere but the hospital without packing makeup, clothes, and jewelry.

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Lisa: What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?
Jeff: That she didn't know she was going on a trip and where she was going she wouldn't need any luggage.
Lisa: Exactly.

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Stella: Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

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Lisa: You can't ignore the wife dissapearing, and the truck, and the jewelery.
Lt. Doyle: I checked the railroad station. Yesterday at 6:20 am, he bought a ticket. Ten minutes later, he put his wife on a train. Destination: Meritsville. I asure you, the witnesses are that deep.
Lisa: That might have been a woman, but it couldn't have been Mrs. Thorwald. That jewelery...
Lt. Doyle: Look, Miss Fremont, that feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life it's still a fairy tale. I don't know how many times I chased down leads based on women's intuition.

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Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? 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.

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Lisa: What's he doing? Cleaning house?
Jeff: He's washing and scrubbing down the bathroom walls.
Stella: Must've splattered a lot.
[both Jeff and Lisa look at Stella with disgust]
Stella: Come on, that's what were all thinkin'. He killed her in there, now he has to clean up those stains before he leaves.
Lisa: Stella... your choice of words!
Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.

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Lisa: Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means.

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Lisa: According to you, people should be born, live, and die in the same place.

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Stella: 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 homespun philosophy?
Jeff: Readers Digest, April 1939.
Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.

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Lisa: A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.

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Stella: You'd think the rain would've cooled things down. All it did was make the heat wet.

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Jeff: [Lisa wants to be part of Jeff's globe-trotting life of adventure] You don't sleep much, you bathe even less and you'd have to eat things that you wouldn't want to look at while they were alive.

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Lisa: I'm not much on rear window ethics.

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Lt. Doyle: Lars Thorwald... is no more a murderer than I am.
Jeff: [stunned] You mean that you can explain everything strange that has been going on over there, and is still going on?
Lt. Doyle: No, and neither can you. That's a secret private world your looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public.
Lisa: Like killing their wives?
Lt. Doyle: Get that idea out of your head. It will only lead you in the wrong direction.

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Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.

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Stella: Every man's ready to get married when the right girl comes along.

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Stella: I can hear you now: "Get out of my life, you wonderful woman. You're too good for me."

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Lt. Doyle: You didn't see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder?
Jeff: Because everything this fellow's done has been suspicious: trips at night in the rain, knifes, saws, trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn't there anymore.
Lt. Doyle: I admit it does have a mysterious sound. But it could be any number of things for the wife disappearing. Murder is the least part.
Jeff: Now, Doyle, don't tell me that he's just an unemployed magician amusing the neighborhood with his sleight of hand. Don't tell me that.

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[first lines]
Voice on radio: Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown? Do you have that listless feeling...
[the camera pans around the courtyard; cut to later in the day]
Jeff: [answering phone] Jefferies.
Gunnison: Congratulations, Jeff!
Jeff: For what?
Gunnison: For getting rid of that cast!
Jeff: Who said I was getting rid of it?
Gunnison: This is Wednesday; seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no?
Jeff: Gunnison, how did you ever get to be such a big editor with such a small memory?
Gunnison: By thrift, industry, and hard work... and, uh, catching the publisher with his secretary. Did I get the wrong day?
Jeff: No... no, wrong week. *Next* Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon.

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Jeff: I get myself half killed for you and you reward me by stealing my assignments.
Gunnison: I didn't ask you to stand in the middle of that automobile racetrack.
Jeff: You asked for a, something dramatically different. You got it.
Gunnison: So did you.

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Gunnison: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.
Jeff: Yeah, can't you just see me, rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher and the garbage disposal and the nagging wife...
Gunnison: Jeff, wives don't nag anymore. They discuss.
Jeff: Oh, is that so, is that so? Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss. In my neighborhood they still nag.

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Stella: The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse.
Jeff: Oh, hello, Stella.
Stella: And they got no windows in the workhouse.

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Stella: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.
Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?
Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about?" Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.

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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?

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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.

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Jeff: Would you fix me a sandwich, please?
Stella: Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread.

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[describing a dress]
Lisa: A steal at $1,100.
Jeff: Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the stock exchange.

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Jeff: 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.

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Jeff: She sure is the "eat, drink and be merry" girl.
Stella: Yeah, she'll wind up fat, alcoholic and miserable.

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Stella: Maybe one day she'll find her happiness.
Jeff: Yeah, some man'll lose his.

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Jeff: I just can't figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case.
Stella: Well, he's a salesman, isn't he?
Jeff: Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning?
Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up.

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Stella: He's gonna run out on her, the coward.
Jeff: Sometimes it's worse to stay than it is to run.

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Lt. Doyle: Jeff, you've got a lot to learn about homicide. Why, morons have committed murders so shrewdly that it's taken a hundred trained police minds to catch them.

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Jeff: Are you interested in solving this case or in making me look foolish?
Lt. Doyle: Well, if possible, both.
Jeff: Well then, do a good job of it.

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Jeff: What do you need as evidence? Bloody footprints leading up to his door?
Lt. Doyle: One thing I don't need is heckling. You called me and asked for help. Now you're behaving like a taxpayer.
Jeff: You know by tomorrow morning, there may not be any evidence left in that apartment, you know that?
Lt. Doyle: A detective's worst nightmare.

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Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?
Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.

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Lt. Doyle: What do you say we all sit down and have a nice friendly drink too, hmm? Forget all about this. We can tell lies about the good old days during the war.

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Lt. Doyle: Oh, Jeff, if you need any more help, consult the yellow pages in your telephone directory.
Lisa: Oh, I love funny exit lines.

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Lisa: Why would Thorwald want to kill a little dog? Because it knew too much?

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Stella: [to Lisa] You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you?

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Lisa: Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.

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[last lines]
Newlywed woman: ...but if you'd told me you quit your job, we wouldn't have gotten married.
Newlywed man: Oh, honey, come on.

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Detective: [referring to what was buried in Thorwald's flower bed] It's over in his apartment. In a hat box. Wanna look?
Stella: Oh, no thanks - I don't want any part of her.

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Jeff: [shivering as cold alcohol is poured on his back before a rubdown] Say, don't you ever heat that stuff up?
Stella: Aw, it gives your system something to fight against.

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Jeff: What about the knife and saw I saw him wrapping up in newspaper?
Lt. Doyle: Do you own a saw?
Jeff: Well... yeah. At home in my garage, I keep...
Lt. Doyle: How many people did you cut up with it?

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[regarding Jeff's telephoto lens]
Stella: Mind if I use that portable keyhole?

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