Top 100 Patricia Highsmith Quotes
#1. Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.
Patricia Highsmith
#4. Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.
Patricia Highsmith
#5. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
Patricia Highsmith
#6. My story can move fast, as I can't, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can't. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.
Patricia Highsmith
#7. Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.
Patricia Highsmith
#9. Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.
Patricia Highsmith
#10. How was it possible to be afraid and in love ... The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.
Patricia Highsmith
#11. He remembered that right after that, he had stolen a loaf of bread from a delicatessen counter and had taken it home and devoured it, feeling that the world owed a loaf of bread to him, and more.
Patricia Highsmith
#12. I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think?
Patricia Highsmith
#13. And wished with all her power to wish anything, that the woman would simply continue her last words and say, "Are you really so glad to have met me? Then why can't we see each other again? Why can't we even have lunch together today?" Her voice was so casual, and she might have said it so easily.
Patricia Highsmith
#14. A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.
Patricia Highsmith
#15. The kiss became the narrowed center of the still point of the turning world, so that even the park was turning in comparison to the still peace at their lips.
Patricia Highsmith
#16. I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.
Patricia Highsmith
#17. My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace.
Patricia Highsmith
#18. Hate had begun to paralyze his thinking, he realized, to make little blind alleys of the roads that logic had pointed out to him in New York.
Patricia Highsmith
#19. The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.
Patricia Highsmith
#20. They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.
Patricia Highsmith
#22. Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?
Patricia Highsmith
#23. If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.
Patricia Highsmith
#24. He felt he was about to experience again some ancient, delicious childhood moment that the steam calliope's sour hollowness, the stitching hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, and the drum-and-cymbal crash brought almost to the margin of his grasp.
Patricia Highsmith
#25. I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
Patricia Highsmith
#27. I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.
Patricia Highsmith
#28. And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
Patricia Highsmith
#29. I think there's a definite reason for every friendship just as there's a reason why certain atoms unite and others don't - certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other
Patricia Highsmith
#30. The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn't much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art.
Patricia Highsmith
#31. What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said.
Patricia Highsmith
#33. Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.
Patricia Highsmith
#34. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.
Patricia Highsmith
#36. I don't think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that's true. But he's married in later books. I'm not saying he's very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.
Patricia Highsmith
#37. And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.
Patricia Highsmith
#38. It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at all.
Patricia Highsmith
#39. I know that Southern redhead type, Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.
Patricia Highsmith
#40. But when they kissed goodnight in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put together inevitably created desire.
Patricia Highsmith
#42. She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense, like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front of your eyes. They would have to separate here.
Patricia Highsmith
#45. Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.
Patricia Highsmith
#46. Do you like her'
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God.
Patricia Highsmith
#47. I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.
Patricia Highsmith
#48. I hope it will be set in California. In a way, I made a mistake, because a New Jersey policeman can't operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.
Patricia Highsmith
#49. I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.
Patricia Highsmith
#50. Who am I, anyway? Does one exist, or to what extent does one exist as an individual without friends, family, anybody to whom one can relate, to whom one's existence is of the least importance?
Patricia Highsmith
#51. I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.
Patricia Highsmith
#52. And when all's said and done, the final comment will be (from me at least) so what? I'll live with my neuroses. I'll try to develop patience, with my handicapped personality. But I prefer to live with my neuroses and try to make the best of them.
Patricia Highsmith
#53. I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Patricia Highsmith
#54. One blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.
Patricia Highsmith
#55. I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
Patricia Highsmith
#56. The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.
Patricia Highsmith
#57. Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.
Patricia Highsmith
#58. Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.
Patricia Highsmith
#59. Don't you want to forget it, if it's past?"
"I don't know. I don't know just how you mean that."
"I mean, are you sorry?"
"No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes."
"Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?"
"With her," Therese said.
Patricia Highsmith
#60. The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.
Patricia Highsmith
#61. I'm not melancholic,' she protested, but the thin ice was under her feet again, the uncertainties. or was it that she always wanted a little more than she had, no matter how much she had?
Patricia Highsmith
#62. How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn't see her, as he sometimes hadn't seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.
Patricia Highsmith
#67. I got a theory a person ought to do everything it's possible to do before he dies, and maybe die trying to do something that's really impossible.
Patricia Highsmith
#68. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.
Patricia Highsmith
#69. She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.
Patricia Highsmith
#70. Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?
Patricia Highsmith
#71. Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.
Patricia Highsmith
#72. I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.
Patricia Highsmith
#73. And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real?
Patricia Highsmith
#74. That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.
Patricia Highsmith
#75. I'd had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street-there's always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.
Patricia Highsmith
#76. He seems to be making you that way too - enough to tolerate people like him. And once you start tolerating them, you're going to end up being like them yourself.
Patricia Highsmith
#77. I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.
Patricia Highsmith
#81. Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.
Patricia Highsmith
#82. What could be duller than past history!' Therese said, smiling. 'Maybe futures that won't have any history.
Patricia Highsmith
#85. I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
Patricia Highsmith
#86. Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.
Patricia Highsmith
#88. I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.
Patricia Highsmith
#89. Then he said, "That's a long way from stage designing, isn't it." She nodded. "Quite a long way." She started to ask him if he intended to do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn't, because what would it matter if he did or didn't?
Patricia Highsmith
#90. I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.
Patricia Highsmith
#91. I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.
Patricia Highsmith
#92. What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?
Patricia Highsmith
#93. I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.
Patricia Highsmith
#94. He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.
Patricia Highsmith
#95. An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.
'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully.
The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew.
Patricia Highsmith
#96. Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out.
Patricia Highsmith
#97. I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.
Patricia Highsmith
#99. Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.
Patricia Highsmith
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