Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.”

— Patricia Highsmith

52. “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

53. “If the writer thinks about his material long enough, until it becomes a part of his mind and wakes up thinking about it- then at least when he starts to work, it will flow out as if by itself.”

— Patricia Highsmith

54. “January was moments, and January was a year.”

— Patricia Highsmith

55. “Writing is a craft and needs constant practice.”

— Patricia Highsmith

56. “I’ve thought of a wonderful way to start a forest fire,′ Tom said musingly as they were having coffee.”

— Patricia Highsmith

57. “Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. 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

58. “I feel I am in love with you, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.”

— Patricia Highsmith

59. “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

60. “Was it love or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn’t even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.”

— Patricia Highsmith

61. “Don’t you know I love you?’ Carol said.”

— Patricia Highsmith

62. “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.”

— Patricia Highsmith

63. “January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”

— Patricia Highsmith

64. “My angel,” Carold said. “Flung out of space.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— 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. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

78. “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. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

97. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

99. “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

100. “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