Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

January was moments, and January was a year

because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.

Por qué estaba deprimido? —preguntó ella. —No podría explicarlo —frunció las cejas—. No hay unos motivos concretos, excepto que para mí la vida carece de sentido, a menos de que la viva para otra persona. He estado viviendo para usted desde septiembre... aunque no la conocía.

Carol only smiled at her, a little

The trouble some idiots go to

The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

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--and hard to get rid of.

he sensed that suicide was a coward's escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.

Por acaso a vida distribuía apenas os quinhões merecidos?

Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time, as we all learned in the blitz, is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably. We have to learn to live with it.

In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back? The Price of Salt [Carol is the film based on this title.]

Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child in a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever.

For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes met the staring eyes in the mirror, they slipped away as they must have slipped away, Guy thought, that first afternoon on the train, when he had tried to avoid Bruno's eyes.

you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

The desperate boredom of the wealthy, that he often spoke of to Anne. It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation.

Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going?

He realised what a horrible mistake, crime even, he had been guilty of in demanding such a barbaric thing as a girl's hand.

Siento que estoy enamorada de ti, y debería ser primavera. Quiero que el sol caiga sobre mi cabeza como coros musicales. Imagino un sol como Beethoven, un viento como Debussy, y cantos de pájaros como Stravinski. Pero el ritmo es totalmente mío

It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol's body beside her, and the bend of Carol's body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world.

Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out.

Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.

Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.

If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else's, and that therefore not even Carol could understand them.