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Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith Books

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Carol

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Ripley's Game

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A Dog's Ransom

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The Blunderer

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The glass cell

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“Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that 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. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.”

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Book:The Price of Salt
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“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.”

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Book:The Price of Salt
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“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.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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“Therese's lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was, she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else. It was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek's ailing body and her job at the store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real? It was the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late, before the chains fell around her and locked.”

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Book:The Price of Salt
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“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.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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“What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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“Carlos leek altijd over zijn toeren, alsof hij net een stuk of vijf benzedrinetabletten had geslikt. Je kon zijn aandacht niet langer dan één minuut op hetzelfde gericht houden. Van een mening over een stuk van Tennessee Williams sprong hij over op de decorontwerpen van een of andere Fransman, een opname van Sarah Bernhardt die hij op de Universidad had gehoord, een stuk dat een student had geschreven en waarvoor hij overwoog de regering om subsidie te vragen, zodat het kon worden gespeeld. Meeslepend, dat wel, maar niet erg bevredigend. En kon uit al die opwinding kunst voortkomen? Was kunst niet – bijna altijd – emotie die in alle rust tot bespiegeling wordt verheven? Ook voor een zuiderling? Theodore moest lachen om zijn eigen vurige ernst.”

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Book:A Game for the Living
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“At dawn, after my death hours before, The sunlight will spread at seven o’clock as usual On these trees which I know. Greenness will burst, dark green shadows yield To the cruel-benign, indifferent sun. Indifferent will stand the trees in my own garden, Unweeping for me on the morning of my death. Same as ever, roots athirst, The trees will rest in breezeless dawn, Blind and uncaring, The trees that I knew, That I tended.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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“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.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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“I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.”

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Author:Patricia Highsmith
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