The collection / 54 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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54 results · Page 2 of 3Play this collection ▷

01Undated

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

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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02Undated

Obsessions are the only things that matter.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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03Undated

It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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04Undated

Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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05Undated

That's exactly where you're wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far -- and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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06Undated

He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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07Undated

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

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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08Undated

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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09Undated

The justice I have received, I shall give back.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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10Undated

The word “marriage” lingered in Guy’s ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam’s round terra cotta-coloured mouth saying, “Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve’s long dark head, insolently smiling.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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11Undated

At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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12Undated

My story can move fast, as I can't, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can't. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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13Undated

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.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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14Undated

...It had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol-

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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15Undated

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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16Undated

They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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17Undated

And when all's said and done, the final comment will be (from me at least) so what? I'll live with my neuroses. I'll try to develop patience, with my handicapped personality. But I prefer to live with my neuroses and try to make the best of them.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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18Undated

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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19Undated

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.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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20Undated

He did look like an Italian of the worse type, though Vic didn't think he was, and it was an insult to the Italian race to assume that he was. He resembled no particular race, only an amalgamation of the worst elements of various Latin peoples. He looked as if he had spent all his life dodging blows that were probably aimed at him for good reason.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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21Undated

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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22Undated

For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes met the staring eyes in the mirror, they slipped away as they must have slipped away, Guy thought, that first afternoon on the train, when he had tried to avoid Bruno’s eyes.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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23Undated

It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything for certain, had jammed itself in her throat for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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24Undated

Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have said the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.

Patricia Highsmith / quote

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