Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmithwas an American novelist and short story writer, known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Highsmith wrote 22 novels, including her series of five novels with Tom Ripley as protagonist, and many short stories. Michael Dirda observed, "Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 January 1921
CountryUnited States of America
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. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.
Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.
Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!
I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.
I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.
He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn't take money, masses of money, it took a certain security.
The justice I have received, I shall give back.
I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.
Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.
And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.
Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.