Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

Perhaps identity, like hell, was merely other people.

He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.

Writing is a way of organizing experience and life itself.

Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.

There is no moral to my life - I have none - except: 'Stand up and take it'. The rest is sentiment.

This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.

One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts any more. Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed.

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.

I don't want you to think that I'm so good as you put it. I have a little evil side, too. I just keep it well hidden. - Victor Van Allen

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if...What if...' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

One's just supposed to conform. I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow, talking as matter-of-factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good night 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 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.

How was it possible to be afraid and in love, Therese thought. 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 night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.

Did the world always mete out just deserts?

Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

Thanks for all the wonderful memories. They're like something in a museum already or something preserved in amber, a little unreal, as you must have felt yourself always to me.

She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive.

I read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.

I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.

Carol wanted her with her, and whatever happened they would meet it without running. How was it possible to be afraid and in love, Therese thought. 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 night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.

Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially "unlike" man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love.