Carol Quotes

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

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

“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, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“What a strange girl you are.”
“Why?”
“Flung out of space,” Carol said.”
― 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, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“...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, The Price of Salt

“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, The Price of Salt

“What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“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, The Price of Salt

“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, Carol

“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

“You’re forgetting… we never get in trouble in that class. Remember I gave Mr. Hendry that lap dance last year. I’m thinking he’s expecting one this year as well. - Carol”
― Matthew Leeth

“I’ve been thinking that you, me and Kristy should all have a sleepover or something like that. Wouldn‘t that be so cool! - Carol”
― Matthew Leeth

“Therese Belivet:
"I never asked for anything! Maybe that's the problem!”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Carol:
"My angel, flung out of space.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Flung out of space”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“[...]Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Siento que estoy enamorada de ti, y debería ser primavera. Quiero que el sol caiga sobre mi cabeza como coros musicales. Imagino un sol como Beethoven, un viento como Debussy, y cantos de pájaros como Stravinski. Pero el ritmo es totalmente mío”
― Patricia Highsmith, Carol

“Sapeva che cosa la turbava in quel grande negozio. Era il genere di cosa che non avrebbe cercato di spiegare a Richard.
Erano, intensificate, quelle stesse cose che sempre l'avevano turbata, da che aveva uso di memoria: le azioni prive di scopo, le incombenze insignificanti fatte apposta, sembrava, per impedirle di fare quello che avrebbe desiderato, che avrebbe potuto fare. E li erano i procedimenti complicati con il denaro degli incassi, i controlli dei cappotti, gli orologi marcatempo che impedivano alle persone perfino di servire il magazzino al massimo della loro efficienza: la sensazione che ciascuno fosse nel l'impossibilità di comunicare con chiunque altro e vivesse su un piano completamente sbagliato, così che il significato, il messaggio, l'amore o quant'altro ciascuna vita possedeva, non potessero mai avere modo di esprimersi. Tutto ciò le richiamava alla mente conversazioni ai tavoli, sui sofà, con persone le cui parole sembravano aleggiare al di sopra di cose morte e inanimabili, persone che non toccavano mai una corda che vi-brasse, E quando uno tentava di toccare una corda viva, vedendosi subito fissare da facce eternamente impenetrabili, se ne usciva in un'osservazione così perfetta nella sua banalità da rendere quasi impossibile credere che si trattasse di un sotterfugio.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Tu preferisci le cose riflesse in uno specchio, vero? Hai una tua concezione personale di tutto. Come quel mulino a vento. Per te è praticamente lo stesso che essere in Olanda. Mi domando perfino se ti piaccia vedere vere montagne e persone vere. [..] Come puoi sperare di creare qualcosa, se tutte le tue esperienze le hai di seconda mano?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Proprio quella mattina a Waterloo, pensò Therese, un tempo troppo assoluto e troppo perfetto per sembrarle reale, sebbene fosse reale, e non la messa in scena di una commedia [..] a tratti lei si sentiva come un’attrice, ricordava solo di quando in quando la sua identità con un senso di sorpresa, come se in quegli ultimi giorni non avesse fatto che recitare la parte di un’altra persona, incredibilmente ed eccessivamente fortunata.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt