Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

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 brought almost to the margin of his grasp.

Society's law was lax compared to the law of conscience

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

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

I create things out of boredom with reality and with the sameness of routine and objects around me.

A classic is something with a human situation.

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

Death was only one more adventure untried.

Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.

That's exactly where you're wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far -- and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know.

the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn't see her, as he sometimes hadn't seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.

Caviar. How very nice of them, Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. Do you like caviar? No. I wish I did. Why? Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bit where the most caviar was. Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it, Therese said. Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. It's an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant--an hard to get rid of.

She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together.

I feel I am in love with you and it should be Spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

Yes, Therese said. What a strange girl you are. Why? Flung out of space, Carol said.

I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.

La niñas nacen mujeres -dijo Margot, la madre de Thea-. Los niños no nacen hombres. Tienen que aprender a serlo. Pero las niñas ya tienen un carácter de mujer.

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?

The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively, he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

He remembered deciding then that the world was full of Simon Legrees, and that you had to be an animal, as tough as the gorillas who worked with him at the warehouse, or starve.

Odd, Tom thought, that some girls meant sadness and death. Some girls looked like sunlight, creativity, joy, but they really meant death, and not even because the girls were enticing their victims, in fact one might blame the boys for being deceived by—nothing at all, simply imagination.

He seems to be making you that way too - enough to tolerate people like him. And once you start tolerating them, you're going to end up being like them yourself.