Patricia Highsmith quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Patricia Highsmith on Wise Famous Quotes.

Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.

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?

Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?

I'm going to enjoy what I've got as long as it lasts.

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

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.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.

Death was only one more adventure untried.

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

Everything human is alien to me.

Obsessions are the only things that matter.

Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.

Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?

Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.

The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.

Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out.

Did the world always mete out just deserts?

Don't you know I love you?' Carol said.

She hated cleaning up after making something.

I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.

I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.

I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.

I have no television - I hate it.

Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.

A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?

I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think?

Look at it, like a rat,' she said. 'A portrait of Harge.

What could be duller than past history!' Therese said, smiling. 'Maybe futures that won't have any history.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Do you like her'
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God.

There were many times when logic was of no comfort.

A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

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.

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

She envied him. She envied him his faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude.

The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.

My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.

I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

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.

He robs everyone

If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.

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.

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.

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.

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?

It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

My angel," Carold said. "Flung out of space.

Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.

One blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

The flowers you gave me - they died.

I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.

I read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.

Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

Something always turned up. That was Tom's philosophy.

I know that Southern redhead type, Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.

I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.

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.

Though all we have known is only a beginning.

The justice I have received, I shall give back.

Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

I am the forever-seeking.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

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.

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

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.

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!

What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

I don't set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.

I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.

I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.

I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.

I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.

A classic is something with a human situation.

She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?

What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

There is no moral to my life - I have none - except: 'Stand up and take it'. The rest is sentiment.

Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.

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.