Carol Patricia Highsmith Quotes & Sayings

Caviar. How very nice of them," Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. "Do you like caviar?" "No. I wish I did." "Why?" Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bit where the most caviar was. "Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it," Therese said. Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. "It's an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant--an hard to get rid of. — Patricia Highsmith

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

There's nothing wrong with possessions; it's just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They're nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs. That's why wealth is so dangerous: if you're not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns. — Rob Bell

Look at it, like a rat,' she said. 'A portrait of Harge. — Patricia Highsmith

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist. — Patricia Highsmith

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

How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn't see her, as he sometimes hadn't seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him. — Patricia Highsmith

What a strange girl you are." "Why?" "Flung out of space," Carol said. — Patricia Highsmith

God was neither surprised nor afraid. You see, there is no mystery with God. He is never caught off guard. He never wonders how he is going to deal with the unexpected thing. I love the words of Daniel 2:22: "He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him." God is with you in your moments of darkness because he will never leave you. But your darkness isn't dark to him. Your mysteries aren't mysterious to him. Your surprises don't surprise him. He understands all the things that confuse you — Paul David Tripp

Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her. — Patricia Highsmith

It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. — Patricia Highsmith

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka. — Margaret Atwood

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

It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment? — Patricia Highsmith

She knew what bothered her at the store ... It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the pointless actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done-and here it was the complicated procedures with moneybags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people from even serving the store as efficiently as they might-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. — Patricia Highsmith

And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. — Patricia Highsmith

Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too. — Patricia Highsmith

It's the centrality of the Word and not the person who preaches it that's important. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

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

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

In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back? — Patricia Highsmith

Don't you know I love you?' Carol said. — Patricia Highsmith

Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, "Darling, can I ask you to forgive me?"
The tone hurt Therese more than the question. "I love you, Carol."
"But do you see what it means? — Patricia Highsmith

A Canadian is someone who keeps asking the question, 'What is a Canadian? — Irving Layton

An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even that question wasn't definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don't want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have uttered the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it. — Patricia Highsmith

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered — Patricia Highsmith

We do not ask more of the wealthy to punish success; we do it to create more success stories. — Bill De Blasio

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow? — Patricia Highsmith

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

Carol was like a secret spreading through her. — Highsmith, Patricia

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves. — Patricia Highsmith

Therese was propped up on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill, Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that Carol asked her three questions, on that had to do with happiness, one about the store and one about the future. Therese heard herself answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring that she had no control over, and she realized she was in tears. She was telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. — Patricia Highsmith

But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she had not promised.
She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then, too. And now she saw Carol's face changing, saw the little signs of astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment. — Patricia Highsmith

She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol? — Patricia Highsmith

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. — Patricia Highsmith