Patricia Highsmith Price Of Salt 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

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

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing. — 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

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

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

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

She hated cleaning up after making something. — 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

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

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

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

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

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? — Patricia Highsmith

I'd had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street-there's always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me. — Patricia Highsmith

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