Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

158. “I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.”

— Patricia Highsmith

159. “Vic didn’t mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.”

— Patricia Highsmith

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

167. “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

168. “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.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

170. “He robs everyone.”

— Patricia Highsmith

171. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

173. “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

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. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

183. “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

184. “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

185. “The trouble some idiots go to.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

187. “Why I love you Patricia Highsmith, will forever remain a Freudian enigma.”

— Patricia Highsmith

188. “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

189. “Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing – that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that is degeneration by definition.”

— Patricia Highsmith

190. “Every failure teaches something. 12.”

— Patricia Highsmith

191. “The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

194. “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

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

— Patricia Highsmith

196. “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

197. “Flung out of space.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

199. “Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live, am unable to live. All life, to me, is a search for the balanced diet, which does not exist. For me. Alas, I am twenty-nine, and I cannot stand more than five days of the life I have invented as the most ideal. May 17, 1950.”

— Patricia Highsmith

200. “Are all women nothing but symbols?”

— Patricia Highsmith