Patricia Highsmith Quotes

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”

“The justice I have received, I shall give back.”

“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.”

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”

“Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'

'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”

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

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”

“It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”

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

“What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?”

“It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?”

“I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.”

“Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.”

“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.”

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

“How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!”

“But when they kissed goodnight 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.”

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