Patricia Highsmith Quotes

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.

I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

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.

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze...

Once the back of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese's skin there felt seperately alive and rather burning. There could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was...

She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of thing she wouldn’t try to tell Richard. It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember...

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.

What a strange girl you are. Why? Flung out of space,

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.

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

I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.

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...

How was it possible to be afraid and in love... The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every nigh...

I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.

My angel, Carold said. Flung out of space.

The flowers you gave me—they died.

Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.

He felt he was about to experience again some ancient, delicious childhood moment that the steam calliope's sour hollowness, the stitching hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, and the drum-and-cymbal crash brou...

He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.