- Fantasy noir: Pour another one, Joe. My dragon left me for some clean-shaven cape-wearing foreign hero with an accent so thick you can hear the fake passport in his voice.
- Existential noir: these are mean streets to have an empty life in, kid. Thinkers nurse a hangover from their disgust of life for fifty years then roll over and die. This is how we run things in our city. Play it again, will you.
- Southern Gothic Noir: look at yourself, boy. Theyâve got names for people who carry the Bible like that. Theyâve got names for everything around here. And if you donât get it the first time the walls will whisper it back to you.
â Noir Mythology: She was a priestess at some local temple. One of those temple only people who pray for a pint of bourbon and a life insurance go to. And she had a face that meant trouble, make no mistake. But not after Zeus turned her into a cow. Not after Zeus turned her into a cow.
- Noir meta-Shakespeare: Characters like us, Horatio. We werenât born to grow old and mean. We faff around, we mix a stiff one, and then we die. But when we die, we die hard and we make sure we bring the whole damn city down with us.
- Noir Milton: Heaven looked high class from fifty feet away but from five feet away it looked like the kind of place meant to be seen from fifty feet away. Stay there long enough you get a double pint of Hellâs Bells. Real hell is my business now. Real hell is how I make my nickel.
- Noir William Blake: She was the sort of tiger a bishop would paint crosses on his front door against. You canât tell anything from tigers like that. She could have had the sheriff in the back room. She could have been making millions. But you could tell she burned bright in all the right places. Oh, dhe burned bright all right.
- Noir Dylan Thomas: Alright, old man. Amateur hour is over. You go down kicking and screaming or you donât go down at all, you get my meaning?
- Noir Keats: Outside, the Autumn smelled of politics: it asked only for the highest types of men and had nothing to offer them but bleating lambs and the song of crickets. The sort of autumn that shares his smokes and his wife with the maturing sun. âI donât like Spring,â the kid said. âThatâs all right, sonny boy. I ainât selling it.â
- Noir Edgar Allan Poe: You could tell from the way he sauntered in the bird meant business. He had the kind of beak that could drive a nail through your forehead. Didnât string more than two words together but he knew all the right ones all the same. He knew which ones stung. âI donât want no birds in my room,â I said, loud enough for hell to hear. But birds like that donât just scram. Birds like that stick to you like a bad divorce from a Hollywood diva.