Fuck Yeah Patricia Highsmith

Welcome to Highsmith Country.

[pat-highsmith]

In a poem she wrote when she was only twenty she imagined what her state of mind would be like in the future, after travelling around the world, she surmised, she would know hundreds of people in a clutch of different cities and yet she would still be lonely. ‘I am the forever-seeking,’ she said.

(via pat-highsmith)

[pat-highsmith]

Patricia Highsmith’s imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her – her negative capability, if you like – was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world.

A WILSON (via pat-highsmith)

[elizabethellenfastmachine-deact]

He was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made. But he no longer felt tired after several hours of it, as he had at first. He had no need to relax when he was alone. Now, from the moment when he got out of bed and went to brush his teeth, he was Dickie, brushing his teeth with his right elbow jutted out, Dickie rotating the eggshell on his spoon for the last bite. Dickie invariably putting back the first tie he pulled off the rack and selecting a second. He had even produced a painting in Dickie’s manner.

The Talented Mr. RIpley, Patricia Highsmith (via elizabethellenfastmachine)

[pi-no]

‘İnsan, ilkeler koyup hedefler belirliyor, sonra da bunlarda umduklarını bulamıyordu.’

Patricia Highsmith

[annehstevens]

An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.

Tom Ripley, in Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley Under Ground (1970).

[takemyrevolutions]

He remembered that right after that, he had stolen a loaf of bread from a delicatessen counter and had taken it home and devoured it, feeling that the world owed a loaf of bread to him, and more.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

[mexicantrashgirl]

You know the most interesting thing about doing something terrible? After a few days, you can’t even remember it.

Tom Ripley

[cultureclashmarvel]

Don’t you just take the past and put it in a room in a basement and lock the door and never go in there? That’s what I do, And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is to toss them the key and say; open up, step inside, but you can’t, because it’s dark, There’s demons and if anybody saw how ugly it is. I keep wanted to do that, fling the door open just let light in and clean everything out.

Tom Ripley

[thepriceofsaltsblog]

A vision of Carol’s cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept back humbly in the question, couldn’t she ask simply to sleep in the same bed with her? “Carol, would you mind—” “Tomorrow we’ll go to the stockyards,” Carol said at the same time, and Therese burst out laughing. “What’s so damned funny about that?” Carol asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too. “It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night. “You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she pulled the light out.”

Excerpt From: Highsmith, Patricia. “The Price of Salt, or Carol.”

[literatureandtrees]

And they’d both slightly, politely, leave him out. Every friendly thing they would say to him would be a painful effort. Tom couldn’t bear to imagine it. -Tom Ripley-

This series is such an indulgent read. You can smell the espresso and taste every glass of wine .

[sdreyfus]

My young protagonist Therese may appear a shrinking violet in my book, but those were the days when gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being homosexual. The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell. Many of the letters that came to me carried such messages as “Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending! We don’t all commit suicide and lots “of us are doing fine.” Others said, “Thank you for writing such a story. It is a little like my own story …” And, “I am eighteen and I live in a small town. I feel lonely because I can’t talk to anyone …” Sometimes I wrote a letter suggesting that the writer go to a larger town where there would be a chance to meet more people. As I remember, there were as many letters from men as from women, which I considered a good omen for my book. This turned out to be true. The letters trickled in for years, and even now a letter comes once or twice a year from a reader. I never wrote another book like this.

afterword for The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith

[salesonfilm-deactivated20180514]

Acquired tastes are so much more delightful than natural ones.

Patricia Highsmith in her diary, 1948 (via salesonfilm)

[jdvancefreefeetpics]

This paragraph is a journey

[throwback1009]

Patricia Highsmith. 

Real name: Mary Patricia Plangman

[nitchdotcom-deactivated20220207]

Patricia Highsmith // “Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

[fypatriciahighsmith]

All these years later, Highsmith is still pissing people off.

Kim Morgan, from her essay “The Gnarly Allure of Patricia Highsmith” published in the Daily Beast

[litpills-blog]

Today we add a classic thriller writer to the LitPill prescriptions, Patricia Highsmith. Known for Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, she knew how to craft a taught thriller with plenty of unspoken man-love. Get her sticker, here, today!