anna > anna's Quotes

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'

'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“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, Carol

“How was it possible to be afraid and in love... The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex