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Patricia Highsmith Quotes

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer, known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Highsmith wrote 22 novels, including her series of five novels with Tom Ripley as protagonist, and many short stories. Existentialism is the literary movement that most influenced her writing, with "Dostoyevsky and Gide through Camus and Sartre" among her favorite authors. Graham Greene described Highsmith as "the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time...is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably." Published under the pseudonym of "Claire Morgan," Highsmith wrote the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt, republished 38 years later as Carol under her own name.

✵ 19. January 1921 – 4. February 1995
Patricia Highsmith photo

Works

The Price of Salt
The Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith
Strangers on a Train
Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith
The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
The Price of Salt
The Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith
Strangers on a Train
Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith
The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith: 22 quotes6 likes

Famous Patricia Highsmith Quotes

“Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

Patricia Highsmith

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Glass Cell

Source: The Glass Cell

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Talented Mr. Ripley

Source: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith Quotes about people

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

Patricia Highsmith Quotes

“Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Talented Mr. Ripley

Source: The Talented Mr. Ripley

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

“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?”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book Strangers on a Train

Source: Strangers on a Train

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book Strangers on a Train

Source: Strangers on a Train

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

Patricia Highsmith book Strangers on a Train

Source: Strangers on a Train

“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.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

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