Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

104. “I’d had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street-there’s always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.”

— Patricia Highsmith

105. “Death was only one more adventure untried.”

— Patricia Highsmith

106. “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

107. “She’s everything that should be loathed,” he went on, staring in front of him. “Sometimes I think I hate everything in the world. No decency, no conscience. She’s what people mean when they say America never grows up, America rewards the corrupt. She’s the type who goes to the bad movies, acts in them, reads the love-story magazines, lives in a bungalow, and whips her husband into earning more money this year so they can buy on the installment plan next year, breaks up her neighbor’s marriage –.”

— Patricia Highsmith

108. “Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.”

— Patricia Highsmith

109. “The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn’t the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. “And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn’t even that. Or maybe it is collectively,” he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.”

— Patricia Highsmith

110. “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

111. “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

112. “For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love.”

— Patricia Highsmith

113. “You either let some event ruin your life or not. The decision is yours.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

115. “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

116. “I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I’m having trouble. I’ve just sacked my second screenwriter.”

— Patricia Highsmith

117. “She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together.”

— Patricia Highsmith

118. “A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game – or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the philosophers.”

— Patricia Highsmith

119. “It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate?”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

121. “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

122. “Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have said the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

123. “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

124. “What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?”

— Patricia Highsmith

125. “My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.”

— Patricia Highsmith

126. “Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially “unlike” man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.”

— Patricia Highsmith

127. “It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything for certain, had jammed itself in her throat for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe.”

— Patricia Highsmith

128. “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

129. “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

130. “Caviar. How very nice of them,” Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. “Do you like caviar?” “No. I wish I did.” “Why?” Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bit where the most caviar was. “Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it,” Therese said. Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. “It’s an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant – an hard to get rid of.”

— Patricia Highsmith

131. “Something always turned up. That was Tom’s philosophy.”

— Patricia Highsmith

132. “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

133. “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.”

— Patricia Highsmith

134. “He realised what a horrible mistake, crime even, he had been guilty of in demanding such a barbaric thing as a girl’s hand.”

— Patricia Highsmith

135. “She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.”

— Patricia Highsmith

136. “A classic is something with a human situation.”

— Patricia Highsmith

137. “She hated cleaning up after making something.”

— Patricia Highsmith

138. “The anxiety has always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so tortuous he might have welcomed the law’s intervention.”

— Patricia Highsmith

139. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

141. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

143. “I create things out of boredom with reality and with the sameness of routine and objects around me.”

— Patricia Highsmith

144. “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

145. “Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day’s work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

146. “It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn’t remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.”

— Patricia Highsmith

147. “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

148. “How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.”

— Patricia Highsmith

149. “A book is not a thing of one sitting, like a poem, but a longish thing which takes time and energy and since it takes skill, too, the first effort or maybe the second may not find a market.”

— Patricia Highsmith

150. “Look at it, like a rat,′ she said. ‘A portrait of Harge.”

— Patricia Highsmith