Patricia Highsmith Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Patricia Highsmith quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously. — Patricia Highsmith
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously. — Patricia Highsmith
How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!
— Patricia Highsmith
It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?
— Patricia Highsmith
I'm going to enjoy what I've got as long as it lasts.
— Patricia Highsmith
Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.
— Patricia Highsmith
I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.
— Patricia Highsmith
Death was only one more adventure untried.
— Patricia Highsmith
Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
— Patricia Highsmith
Everything human is alien to me.
— Patricia Highsmith
Obsessions are the only things that matter.
— Patricia Highsmith
Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too. — Patricia Highsmith
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too. — Patricia Highsmith
Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.
— Patricia Highsmith
If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.
— Patricia Highsmith
What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?
— Patricia Highsmith
Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.
— Patricia Highsmith
The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.
— Patricia Highsmith
Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out.
— Patricia Highsmith
Did the world always mete out just deserts?
— Patricia Highsmith
Don't you know I love you?' Carol said.
— Patricia Highsmith
She hated cleaning up after making something.
— Patricia Highsmith
I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
— Patricia Highsmith
I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.
— Patricia Highsmith
I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.
— Patricia Highsmith
I have no television - I hate it.
— Patricia Highsmith
Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.
— Patricia Highsmith
Carol was like a secret spreading through her.
— Highsmith, Patricia
A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity.
— Patricia Highsmith
My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.
— Patricia Highsmith
At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?
— Patricia Highsmith
I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think?
— Patricia Highsmith
Look at it, like a rat,' she said. 'A portrait of Harge.
— Patricia Highsmith
What could be duller than past history!' Therese said, smiling. 'Maybe futures that won't have any history.
— Patricia Highsmith
Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.
— Patricia Highsmith
A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
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
I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.
— Patricia Highsmith
Do you like her'
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God. — Patricia Highsmith
'Of course!' What a question! Like asking her if she believe in God. — Patricia Highsmith
She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.
— Patricia Highsmith
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.
— Patricia Highsmith
The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.
— Patricia Highsmith
My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
He robs everyone
— Patricia Highsmith
Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?
— Patricia Highsmith
I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.
— Patricia Highsmith
I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.
— Patricia Highsmith
She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive.
— Patricia Highsmith
For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.
— Patricia Highsmith
I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
There were many times when logic was of no comfort.
— Patricia Highsmith
I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.
— Patricia Highsmith
The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.
— Patricia Highsmith
My angel," Carold said. "Flung out of space.
— Patricia Highsmith
Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
The flowers you gave me - they died.
— Patricia Highsmith
I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
— Patricia Highsmith
I read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.
— Patricia Highsmith
Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.
— Patricia Highsmith
Something always turned up. That was Tom's philosophy.
— Patricia Highsmith
I know that Southern redhead type, Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.
— Patricia Highsmith
I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
— Patricia Highsmith
I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
— Patricia Highsmith
I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.
— Patricia Highsmith
Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Though all we have known is only a beginning.
— Patricia Highsmith
The justice I have received, I shall give back.
— Patricia Highsmith
Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.
— Patricia Highsmith
I am the forever-seeking.
— Patricia Highsmith
And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!
— Patricia Highsmith
What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said.
— Patricia Highsmith
Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.
— Patricia Highsmith
I don't set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.
— Patricia Highsmith
I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.
— Patricia Highsmith
Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.
— Patricia Highsmith
I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.
— Patricia Highsmith
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
Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.
— Patricia Highsmith
I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.
— Patricia Highsmith
A classic is something with a human situation.
— Patricia Highsmith
She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?
— Patricia Highsmith
What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?
— Patricia Highsmith
There is no moral to my life - I have none - except: 'Stand up and take it'. The rest is sentiment.
— Patricia Highsmith
Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.
— Patricia Highsmith