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“Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.”

Quote by Andrew Wilson

Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

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Andrew Wilson

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“If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.”

PeopleLifeMindLyingImaginationFictionVisionMankindIdentityEgoAmbitionEmpathyHumanMadDisappointmentContactInsaneMiserableHypocrisySicknessDeceitAutismAvoidanceVisionsLoathePlanetAvoidOutsideSplitIdentitiesCharadeEmpathiseSelf NessSubsume
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“As soon as [Patricia Highsmith] had stopped work, she felt purposeless and quite at a loss about what to do with herself. 'There is no real life except in working,' she wrote in her notebook, 'that is to say in the imagination.' It was in this state that she observed that only one situation would drive her to commit murder - being part of a family unit. Most likely, she thought, she would strike out in anger at a small child, felling them in one blow. But children over the age of eight, she surmised, would probably take two blows to kill. The reality of socialising with anyone, no matter how close, she said, left her feeling fatigued.”

LifeChildrenPurposeImaginationWorkLossFamilySolitudeMurderChildAutismFatigueWorkingAspergersAspergers SyndromeFamily UnitSocialisingFatiguedAsperger SPurposeless
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to [Patricia Highsmith] than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, and area which, like one of the working titles for Strangers on a Train, could be said to lie at 'The Other Side of the Mirror'.”

WorldRealRealityImaginationFictionMirrorSpunWebInhabitParaxial
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“[Patricia Highsmith] had experienced at first hand many of Ripley's characteristics - splintered identity, insecurity, inferiority, obsession with an object of adoration, and the violence that springs from repression. Like her young anti-hero, she knew that in order to survive, it was necessary to prop oneself up with a psychological fantasy of one's own making. 'Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination,' she wrote in her notebook while writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. 'Existence is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.”

WritingHappinessImaginationExistenceFantasyViolenceIdentitySurvivalNegativeSuicideSurfaceObsessionUnconsciousInsecurityPessimismAdorationRepressionInferiorityPessimisticSurviveAnti HeroSplintered Identity
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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