Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.”

— Patricia Highsmith

152. “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

153. “The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she told him, “I’m looking for somebody,” and went on to the doorway. She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the room where a piano played.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

155. “And she wondered, as she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him.”

— Patricia Highsmith

156. “And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real?”

— Patricia Highsmith

157. “Then he said, “That’s a long way from stage designing, isn’t it.” She nodded. “Quite a long way.” She started to ask him if he intended to do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn’t, because what would it matter if he did or didn’t?”

— Patricia Highsmith

158. “That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow, talking as matter-of-factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials, which put together inevitably created desire.”

— Patricia Highsmith

159. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

161. “He robs everyone.”

— Patricia Highsmith

162. “The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else – of her and Sam, of his friends, of his hope, of his interests, really.”

— Patricia Highsmith

163. “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

164. “A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

166. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

168. “I don’t want you to think that I’m so good as you put it. I have a little evil side, too. I just keep it well hidden. – Victor Van Allen.”

— Patricia Highsmith

169. “The desperate boredom of the wealthy, that he often spoke of to Anne. It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation.”

— Patricia Highsmith

170. “Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child in a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever.”

— Patricia Highsmith

171. “It would be almost like love, what she felt for Carol, except that Carol was a woman. It was not quite insanity, but it was certainly blissful.”

— Patricia Highsmith

172. “A book is a really long continuous process, which ideally, should be interrupted only by sleep.”

— Patricia Highsmith

173. “I appreciate your sentiments but I do not waste my time punching people in the nose. If I really don’t like somebody, I kill him. – Victor Van Allen.”

— Patricia Highsmith

174. “She had the look of a mother or an older sister now – the old feminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men.”

— Patricia Highsmith

175. “He had actually been to weak even to leave the hotel, but he had crawled around on the floor of his room, following the patches of sunlight that came through his windows, so that he wouldn’t look so white the next time he came down to the beach.”

— Patricia Highsmith

176. “Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.”

— Patricia Highsmith

177. “Besides, it isn’t appropriate for a man to divorce his wife. She should divorce him. – Victor Van Allen.”

— Patricia Highsmith

178. “The trouble some idiots go to.”

— Patricia Highsmith

179. “Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going?”

— Patricia Highsmith

180. “Flung out of space.”

— Patricia Highsmith

181. “Ser incapaz de amar puede convertirse en una enfermedad.”

— Patricia Highsmith

182. “An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.”

— Patricia Highsmith

183. “It was important that the objects of love be nothing but recipients, he thought again. Love was an outgoing thing, a gift that one should not expect to be returned. Stendhall must have said that, Proust certainly, using other words: a piece of wisdom his eyes had passed over reading.”

— Patricia Highsmith

184. “I’m still an old pearl in a new oyster.”

— Patricia Highsmith

185. “They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”

— Patricia Highsmith

186. “It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol’s body beside her, and the bend of Carol’s body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world.”

— Patricia Highsmith

187. “During the ten-day voyage Tom lived in a peculiar atmosphere of doom and of heroic, unselfish courage. He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.”

— Patricia Highsmith

188. “If I had been blind, I could have got married, I am pretty sure.”

— Patricia Highsmith

189. “Every failure teaches something. 12.”

— Patricia Highsmith

190. “Miscellania: How to get rid of persistent boy friends. Should I develop a healthy case of dandruff?”

— Patricia Highsmith

191. “Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.”

— Patricia Highsmith

192. “How was Frank ever going to achieve the big justification, which would take away all his guilt? He might never find a total justification, but he had to find an attitude. Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive attitude or self-destructive attitude.”

— Patricia Highsmith

193. “I can easily bear cold, loneliness, hunger and toothache, but I cannot bear noise, heat, interruprions, or other people.”

— Patricia Highsmith

194. “Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow.”

— Patricia Highsmith

195. “Some things don’t react. But everything’s alive.”

— Patricia Highsmith

196. “Besides, he loved his shop better than his house, and here on Sundays he could browse among his own books undisturbed, eat his lunch, doze, and answer at length some of the correspondence, erudite and whimsical, he received from people he had never seen but whom he felt he knew well. Booklovers: if you knew what kind of books a man wanted, you knew the man.”

— Patricia Highsmith

197. “If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else’s, and that therefore not even Carol could understand them.”

— Patricia Highsmith

198. “The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm.”

— Patricia Highsmith

199. “He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.”

— Patricia Highsmith

200. “He had such slow reactions to everything. Physical danger. Emotional blows. Sometimes his reactions were weeks late, so that.”

— Patricia Highsmith