Top 100 Highsmith Quotes
#1. Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time, as we all learned in the blitz, is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably. We have to learn to live with it.
Patricia Highsmith
#2. Throughout her life, Highsmith looked for women whom she could worship. Sex was far from the most important factor in any relationship; rather, it was this near-divine quality for which she yearned.
Andrew Wilson
#3. [Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.
Andrew Wilson
#4. In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Eleanor Catton
#5. Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.
Patricia Highsmith
#7. I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to interfere with their work. I don't want them to interfere with mine.
Patricia Highsmith
#9. But even that question wasn't definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don't want to die yet without knowing you.
Patricia Highsmith
#10. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?
Patricia Highsmith
#13. If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.
Patricia Highsmith
#14. 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
#15. APM is about people, their interactions, and creating an environment in which individual creativity and capability erupts to create great products. It's people, not processes, that build great products.
Jim Highsmith
#16. In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.
Jim Highsmith
#17. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
Patricia Highsmith
#18. In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.
Patricia Highsmith
#19. What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?
Patricia Highsmith
#20. 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
#21. Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.
Patricia Highsmith
#22. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.
Patricia Highsmith
#24. Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.
Patricia Highsmith
#25. 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
#26. Odd, Tom thought, that some girls meant sadness and death. Some girls looked like sunlight, creativity, joy, but they really meant death, and not even because the girls were enticing their victims, in fact one might blame the boys for being deceived by - nothing at all, simply imagination.
Patricia Highsmith
#27. Therese had read about that special pleasure people got from the fact that someone they loved was attractive in the eyes of other people, too. She simply didn't have it.
Patricia Highsmith
#28. Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos - some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.
Jim Highsmith
#29. Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.
Jim Highsmith
#30. In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.
Jim Highsmith
#31. If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.
Jim Highsmith
#32. 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
#33. I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think?
Patricia Highsmith
#34. 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
#35. A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.
Patricia Highsmith
#36. Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.
Jim Highsmith
#37. There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking.
Jim Highsmith
#38. Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability
Jim Highsmith
#39. Agile methods don't attempt to describe everything that any development effort might need in thousands of pages of documentation. Instead they describe a minimal set of activities that are needed to create swarm intelligence.
Jim Highsmith
#40. Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams.
Jim Highsmith
#41. Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.
Patricia Highsmith
#42. If you have unskilled people who work poorly together, no amount of process will save your projects.
Jim Highsmith
#43. 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
#44. I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.
Patricia Highsmith
#45. She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive.
Patricia Highsmith
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she told him, "I'm looking for somebody," and went on to the doorway. She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the room where a piano played.
Patricia Highsmith
#49. This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.
Patricia Highsmith
#50. 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
#52. When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.
Patricia Highsmith
#53. The mere thought that she was alone and surrounded by books gave her a near-sensuous thrill. As she looked around her room, dark escaper for the slash of light near her lamp, and saw the vague outlines of her books, she asked herself 'Have I not the whole world?
Andrew Wilson
#55. 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
#56. You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your courage that I hadn't suspected, and it gives me courage.
Patricia Highsmith
#59. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.
Patricia Highsmith
#60. I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.
Patricia Highsmith
#61. The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner
Jim Highsmith
#62. Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?
Patricia Highsmith
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
Patricia Highsmith
#67. APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.
Jim Highsmith
#69. What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.
Jim Highsmith
#70. I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.
Patricia Highsmith
#71. And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
Patricia Highsmith
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect
Jim Highsmith
#76. What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said.
Patricia Highsmith
#77. People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.
Patricia Highsmith
#79. Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.
Patricia Highsmith
#80. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.
Patricia Highsmith
#82. Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change ... agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.
Jim Highsmith
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I know that Southern redhead type, Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.
Patricia Highsmith
#87. 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
#88. Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.
Jim Highsmith
#89. The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.
Jim Highsmith
#91. 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
#92. There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man's existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.
Patricia Highsmith
#93. The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.
Jim Highsmith
#96. Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.
Patricia Highsmith
#97. I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
Patricia Highsmith
#98. And everything was made of paper: sentences, pardons, pleas, bad records, demerits, proof of guilt, but never, it seemed, proof of innocence. If there were no paper, Carter felt, the entire judicial system would collapse and disappear.
Patricia Highsmith
#99. Do you like her'
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God.
Patricia Highsmith
#100. When she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.
Patricia Highsmith
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