Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time, irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds she might turn and see the face she would never see again.

I'm going to enjoy what I've got as long as it lasts.

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 think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.

People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.

Something always turned up. That was Tom's philosophy.

Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.

Who am I, anyway? Does one exist, or to what extent does one exist as an individual without friends, family, anybody to whom one can relate, to whom one's existence is of the least importance?

But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she had not promised. She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then, too. And now she saw Carol's face changing, saw the little signs of astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment.

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?

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

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.

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.

I think there's a definite reason for every friendship just as there's a reason why certain atoms unite and others don't—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other

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.

His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.

Hay algo más aburrido que la historia del pasado? -dijo Therese sonriendo. -Quizá un futuro sin historia.

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 them in her memory:

She hated cleaning up after making something.

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

There were many times when logic was of no comfort.

The flowers you gave me—they died.