255 Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean.

I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

And everything was made of paper: sentences, pardons, pleas, bad records, demerits, proof of guilt, but never, it seemed, proof of innocence. If there were no paper, Carter felt, the entire judicial system would collapse and disappear.

Obsessions are the only things that matter.

[...] 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.

The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art.

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.

Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?""By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.