- Stella: How much do we need to bail Lisa from jail?
- L.B. Jefferies: Well, this is first offense burglary, that's about $250. I have $127.
- Stella: Lisa's handbag. Uh... 50 cents. I got $20 or so in my purse.
- L.B. Jefferies: And what about the rest?
- Stella: When those cops at the station see Lisa, they'll even contribute.
- Lisa Fremont: I wish I could be creative.
- L.B. Jefferies: Oh sweetie, you are. You have a great talent for creating difficult situations.
- L.B. Jefferies: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?
- Lisa Fremont: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home.
- Lisa Fremont: What's he doing? Cleaning house?
- L.B. Jefferies: 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 Fremont: Stella... your choice of words!
- Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet.
- L.B. Jefferies: She wants me to marry her.
- Stella: That's normal.
- L.B. Jefferies: I don't want to.
- Stella: That's abnormal.
- L.B. Jefferies: [into the phone] 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.
- Tom Doyle: [voice] Like an old hambone?
- L.B. Jefferies: I don't know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife.
- L.B. Jefferies: When am I going to see you again?
- Lisa Fremont: [angry] Not for a long time...
- [softening]
- Lisa Fremont: at least not until tomorrow night.
- Lisa Fremont: How's your leg?
- L.B. Jefferies: Hurts a little.
- Lisa Fremont: Your stomach?
- L.B. Jefferies: Empty as a football.
- Lisa Fremont: And your love life?
- L.B. Jefferies: Not too active.
- Lisa Fremont: Anything else bothering you?
- L.B. Jefferies: Uh-huh, who are you?
- 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.
- Lisa Fremont: Today's a very special day.
- L.B. Jefferies: It's just another run-of-the-mill Wednesday. The calendar's full of 'em.
- Stella: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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.
- Gunnison: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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.
- L.B. Jefferies: Oh, is that so, is that so? Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss. In my neighborhood they still nag.
- Stella: He's gonna run out on her, the coward.
- L.B. Jefferies: Sometimes it's worse to stay than it is to run.
- Lisa Fremont: 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 Fremont: Why not? I always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald.
- L.B. Jefferies: She sure is the "eat, drink and be merry" girl.
- Stella: Yeah, she'll wind up fat, alcoholic and miserable.
- 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?
- L.B. Jefferies: Reader's Digest, April 1939.
- Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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?
- L.B. Jefferies: 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 Fremont: Mrs. Thorwald!
- Stella: You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? Mr. Thorwald could hardly bury his wife's body in plot of ground about one foot square. Unless he put her in standing on end, in which case he wouldn't need the knives and saw.
- Lisa Fremont: What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?
- L.B. Jefferies: That she didn't know she was going on a trip and where she was going she wouldn't need any luggage.
- Lisa Fremont: Exactly.
- Tom Doyle: You didn't see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder?
- L.B. Jefferies: 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.
- Tom 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.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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.
- L.B. Jefferies: Would you fix me a sandwich, please?
- Stella: Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread.
- L.B. Jefferies: [Jeff watching Lt. Doyle staring at Miss Torso dancing in her room] How's your wife?
- [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]
- L.B. Jefferies: [answering phone] Jefferies.
- Gunnison: Congratulations, Jeff!
- L.B. Jefferies: For what?
- Gunnison: For getting rid of that cast!
- L.B. Jefferies: Who said I was getting rid of it?
- Gunnison: This is Wednesday; seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no?
- L.B. Jefferies: 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?
- L.B. Jefferies: No... no, wrong week. *Next* Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon.
- [describing a dress]
- Lisa Fremont: A steal at $1,100.
- L.B. Jefferies: Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the stock exchange.
- L.B. Jefferies: She's like a queen bee with her pick of the drones.
- Lisa Fremont: I'd say she's doing a woman's hardest job: juggling wolves.
- Lisa Fremont: 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.
- L.B. Jefferies: You know by tomorrow morning, there may not be any evidence left in that apartment. You know that?
- Tom Doyle: A detective's worst nightmare.
- L.B. Jefferies: Well, then want do you need as probable cause for a search warrant? Bloody footprints leading up to his front door?
- Tom Doyle: One thing I don't need is heckling. You called me and asked for help. Now you're behaving like a taxpayer.
- Lisa Fremont: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?
- L.B. Jefferies: He gets it from the landlady once a month.
- Lisa Fremont: A woman never goes anywhere but the hospital without packing makeup, clothes, and jewelry.
- L.B. Jefferies: [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.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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.
- L.B. Jefferies: You asked for a, something dramatically different. You got it.
- Gunnison: So did you.
- [Thorwald forces Jeff's apartment door open and stands before him, closing the door behind him]
- Lars Thorwald: What do you want from me?
- [Jeff does not reply]
- Lars Thorwald: Your friend, the girl, could have turned me in. Why didn't she?
- [no reply]
- Lars Thorwald: What do you want? A lot of money? I don't have any money.
- [no reply]
- Lars Thorwald: Say something.
- [no reply]
- Lars Thorwald: Say something! Tell me what you want!
- [Jeff continues to remain silent]
- Lars Thorwald: Can you get me that ring back?
- L.B. Jefferies: No.
- Lars Thorwald: Tell her to bring it back!
- L.B. Jefferies: I can't. The police have it by now.
- L.B. Jefferies: 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?
- L.B. Jefferies: Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning?
- Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up.
- Lisa Fremont: You can't ignore the wife dissapearing, and the trunk, and the jewelery.
- Tom 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 Fremont: That might have been a woman, but it couldn't have been Mrs. Thorwald. That jewelery...
- Tom 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.