Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My angel,” Carold said. “Flung out of space.”

— Patricia Highsmith

52. “She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn’t she and Carol?”

— Patricia Highsmith

53. “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

54. “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

55. “What could be duller than past history!′ Therese said, smiling. ‘Maybe futures that won’t have any history.”

— Patricia Highsmith

56. “Thanks for all the wonderful memories. They’re like something in a museum already or something preserved in amber, a little unreal, as you must have felt yourself always to me.”

— Patricia Highsmith

57. “One’s just supposed to conform. 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

58. “Did the world always mete out just deserts?”

— Patricia Highsmith

59. “You say you love me however I am and when I curse. I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you will become.”

— Patricia Highsmith

60. “But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.”

— Patricia Highsmith

61. “I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?”

— Patricia Highsmith

62. “Beyond Sicily came Greece. He definitely wanted to see Greece. He wanted to see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf with Dickie’s money, Dickie’s clothes, Dickie’s way of behaving with strangers. But would it happen that he couldn’t see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf? Would one thing after another come up to thwart him – murder, suspicion, people? He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity.”

— Patricia Highsmith

63. “You’re about as weak as a match”. Carol held it burning for a moment after she lighted her cigarette. “But given the right conditions, you could burn a house down, couldn’t you?”

— Patricia Highsmith

64. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

66. “Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.”

— Patricia Highsmith

67. “Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.”

— Patricia Highsmith

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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 – what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

— Patricia Highsmith

71. “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

72. “The flowers you gave me – they died.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

74. “Though all we have known is only a beginning.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

76. “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

77. “I don’t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

78. “She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time, irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds she might turn and see the face she would never see again.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

81. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

84. “Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to- five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn’t as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way.”

— Patricia Highsmith

85. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

90. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

92. “But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.”

— Patricia Highsmith

93. “There is no moral to my life – I have none – except: ‘Stand up and take it’. The rest is sentiment.”

— Patricia Highsmith

94. “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

95. “Sunlight came through the windows slowly, like something liquid pouring between the red curtains on to the rug. The sunlight was like an arpeggio that Tom could almost hear – this time Chopin, perhaps.”

— Patricia Highsmith

96. “In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?”

— Patricia Highsmith

97. “Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.”

— Patricia Highsmith

98. “How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!”

— Patricia Highsmith

99. “He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take money, masses of money, it took a certain security.”

— Patricia Highsmith

100. “I didn’t hang around films. I don’t know if I’d ever seen Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.”

— Patricia Highsmith