255 Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

What could be duller than past history!′ Therese said, smiling. ‘Maybe futures that won’t have any history.

My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.

There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.

Writing is a craft and needs constant practice.

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.

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.

It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate?

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?

I’m going to enjoy what I’ve got as long as it lasts.