Patricia Highsmith Quotes

I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes.

Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk.

Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words: THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Autumn, in his leafless bowers, is waiting for the winter's snow.

The same sun that hardens the clay softens the wax.

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

Everything has changed and nothing is changed.

While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate...

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.

Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.