Patricia Highsmith Quotes

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

'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“Was it love or wasn't it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn't even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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, Strangers on a Train

“Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“I'd had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street-there's always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“...It had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol-”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“She knew what bothered her at the store...It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the pointless actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done-and here it was the complicated procedures with moneybags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people from even serving the store as efficiently as they might-the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“She hated cleaning up after making something.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“I'm not melancholic,' she protested, but the thin ice was under her feet again, the uncertainties. or was it that she always wanted a little more than she had, no matter how much she had?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“She (Patricia Higsmith) was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being…I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly…. But her books? Brilliant.”
― Otto Penzler

“[...]Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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”
― Patricia Highsmith, Carol

“The mere thought that she was alone and surrounded by books gave her a near-sensuous thrill. As she looked around her room, dark escaper for the slash of light near her lamp, and saw the vague outlines of her books, she asked herself 'Have I not the whole world?”
― Andrew Wilson