The Talented Mr. Ripley Quotes

“Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn't take money, masses of money, it took a certain security.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Tom laughed at the phrase "sexual deviation." Where was the sex? Where was the deviation? He looked at Freddie and said low and bitterly: "Freddie Miles, you're a victim of your own dirty mind.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“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

“His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“I'm going to enjoy what I've got as long as it lasts.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Something always turned up. That was Tom's philosophy.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Thanks for all the wonderful memories. They're like something in a museum already or something preserved in amber, a little unreal, as you must have felt yourself always to me”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Forever, Tom thought. Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes - his clothes and Dickie’s - and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the
suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing
because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions,
not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man
self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality.
Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take
money, masses of money, it took a certain security. He had been on the road to it,
even with Marc Priminger. He had appreciated Marc’s possessions, and they were
what had attracted him to the house, but they were not his own, and it had been
impossible to make a beginning at acquiring anything of his own on forty dollars a week. It would have taken him the best years of his life, even if he had economised stringently, to buy the things he wanted. Dickie’s money had given
him only an added momentum on the road he had been travelling. The money
gave him the leisure to see Greece, to collect Etruscan pottery if he wanted (he had
recently read an interesting book on that subject by an American living in Rome),
to join art societies if he cared to and to donate to their work. It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning. He had just bought a two-volume edition of Malraux’s Psychologic de I’art which he was now reading, with great pleasure, in French with the aid of a dictionary.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to- five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn't as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He remembered deciding then that the world was full of Simon Legrees, and that you had to be an animal, as tough as the gorillas who worked with him at the warehouse, or starve.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Thanks for all the wonderful memories. They're like something in a museum already or something preserved in amber, a little unreal, as you must have felt yourself always to me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“Did the world always mete out just deserts?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.
'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully.
The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He stared at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear. He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall to the ground. It was too much: the foreignness around him, the different language, his failure, and the fact that Dickie hated him. He felt surrounded by strangeness, by hostility.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“A crazy emotion of hate, of affection, of impatience and frustration was swelling in him, hampering his breathing. He wanted to kill Dickie. It was not the first time he had thought of it. Before, once or twice or three times, it had been an impulse caused by anger or disappointment, an impulse that vanished immediately and left him with a feeling of shame. Now he thought about it for an entire minute, two minutes, because he was leaving Dickie anyway, and what was there to be ashamed of anymore?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“He could say he hadn’t wanted to do them, but he had done them. He didn’t want to be a murderer. Sometimes he could absolutely forget that he had murdered, he realized. But sometimes—like now—he couldn’t. He had surely forgotten for a while tonight, when he had been thinking about the meaning of possessions, and why he liked to live in Europe.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley