Top 100 Patricia Highsmith Quotes
#1. [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
#2. 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
#3. Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.
Patricia Highsmith
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?
Patricia Highsmith
#11. If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.
Patricia Highsmith
#12. 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
#13. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
Patricia Highsmith
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.
Patricia Highsmith
#18. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.
Patricia Highsmith
#20. Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.
Patricia Highsmith
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think?
Patricia Highsmith
#26. 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
#27. A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.
Patricia Highsmith
#28. 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
#29. Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.
Patricia Highsmith
#30. 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
#31. I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.
Patricia Highsmith
#32. She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive.
Patricia Highsmith
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#45. 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
#46. I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.
Patricia Highsmith
#47. Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?
Patricia Highsmith
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
Patricia Highsmith
#53. I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.
Patricia Highsmith
#54. And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
Patricia Highsmith
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said.
Patricia Highsmith
#59. 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
#61. Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.
Patricia Highsmith
#62. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.
Patricia Highsmith
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I know that Southern redhead type, Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.
Patricia Highsmith
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#74. Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.
Patricia Highsmith
#75. I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
Patricia Highsmith
#76. 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
#77. Do you like her'
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God.
Patricia Highsmith
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.
Patricia Highsmith
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. world comes to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there'll be a kind of right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I mean?" Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he still laughed at himself. "Did you ever wear out a sweater
Patricia Highsmith
#85. Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, "Darling, can I ask you to forgive me?"
The tone hurt Therese more than the question. "I love you, Carol."
"But do you see what it means?
Patricia Highsmith
#86. I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.
Patricia Highsmith
#87. 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
#88. I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Patricia Highsmith
#89. 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
#90. I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
Patricia Highsmith
#91. The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.
Patricia Highsmith
#92. 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
#93. A few years ago, there were requests to me, Can we make this? I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake.
Patricia Highsmith
#94. She wanted two weeks of working among people she didn't know, doing the kind of work a million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else's shoes. She
Patricia Highsmith
#95. Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.
Patricia Highsmith
#96. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.
Patricia Highsmith
#97. He remembered deciding then that the world was full of Simon Legrees, and that you had to be an animal, as tough as the gorillas who worked with him at the warehouse, or starve.
Patricia Highsmith
#98. I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.
Patricia Highsmith
#99. One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts any more. Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed.
Patricia Highsmith
#100. 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
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