Strangers on a Train Quotes

“Her insan cinayet işleyebilir. Durumlara bağlı, yapıyla hiç ilgisi yok. Kişi sınıra kadar gelir bazen-bardağı taşıran damlada, tamam. Kim olursa olsun. Ninen bile işler. Bilmez miyim?”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth which does not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children, the priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with good nutrition, schooling, health care can, while perceiving itself as progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its highest priority on the technology of war.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one's destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate?”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The anxiety has always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so tortuous he might have welcomed the law's intervention.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else—of her and Sam, of his friends, of his hope, of his interests, really.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“He robs everyone”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“Hate had begun to paralyze his thinking, he realized, to make little blind alleys of the roads that logic had pointed out to him in New York.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The word “marriage” lingered in Guy’s ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam’s round terra cotta-coloured mouth saying, “Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve’s long dark head, insolently smiling.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“I know that Southern redhead type,” Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be 'innate' in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is 'unconditional'; and by the visual literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren't those parts then abnormal, monstrous?”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going?”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“he sensed that suicide was a coward’s escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“The desperate boredom of the wealthy, that he often spoke of to Anne. It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“A crucial moment in human consciousness, then, arrives when man discovers that it is he himself, not the moon or the spring rains or the spirits of the dead, who impregnates the woman; that the child she carries and gives birth to is *his* child, who can make *him* immortal, both mystically, by propitiating the gods with prayers and sacrifices when he is dead, and concretely, by receiving the patrimony from him. At this crossroads of sexual possession, property ownership, and the desire to transcend death, developed the institution we know: the present-day patriarchal family with its supernaturalizing of the penis, its division of labor by gender, its emotional, physical, and material possessiveness, its ideal of monogamous marriage until death (and its severe penalties for adultery by the wife), the "illegitimacy" of a child born outside wedlock, the economic dependency of women, the unpaid domestic services of the wife, the obedience of women and children to male authority, the imprinting and continuation of heterosexual roles.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century. The struggles for that “modest Magna Carta,” as Marx calls it… did not end capitalism, but they changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“. . . there are ways of thinking that we don’t know about. Nothing could be more important or precious than that knowledge, however unborn. The sense of urgency, the spiritual restlessness it engenders, cannot be appeased . . . —Susan Son tag, Styles of Radical Will”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“The living, politicized woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not, whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“The movement to demedicalize childbirth—to treat it as an event in a woman’s life, not as an illness—became a national one, with an increase in home births, alternative birthing practices, and the establishment of “birth centers” and “birthing rooms” in hospitals. Professional midwives were initially at the forefront of this movement, along with women who wanted to experience birth among family and friends with the greatest possible autonomy and choice in the conduct of their labor.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“After dinner, Sammie Franklin and he got into an argument about vermouths. Sammie said the drier the vermouth, the more one had to put into a martini, although he admitted he was not a martini drinker. Bruno said he was not a martini drinker either, but he knew better than that. The argument went on even after his grandmother said good night and left them. They were on the upstairs terrace in the dark, his mother in the glider and he and Sammie standing by the parapet. Bruno ran down to the bar for the ingredients to prove his point. They both made martinis and tasted them, and though it was clear Bruno was right, Sammie kept holding out, and chuckling as if he didn't quite mean what he said either, which Bruni found insufferable”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“Sintió que el sí quedaba absorbido por la oscuridad, no como las demás noches, en que el sí había sido mudo, sin ni siquiera salir de él mismo. El sí deshizo el nudo que tenía en la cabeza tan bruscamente que le hizo daño. Era lo que había estado esperando decir, lo que el silencio de la habitación y las bestias al otro lado de las paredes habían estado esperando oír.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

“Lo hice por... Quería decirle que lo había hecho porque en su interior llevaba suficiente perversidad como para poder hacerlo, que lo había hecho porque en todo ser humano hay un poso de maldad, pero sabía que Owen no iba a entenderle, porque Owen era un hombre práctico. Tan práctico que ni siquiera se tomaba la molestia de atacarle o huir de él, o de avisar a la Policía, puesto que le resultaba más cómodo seguir sentado en el sillón.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren

“No era la energía alegre que había sentido en los otoños de su juventud, sino que por debajo de ella corría una sensación de frenesí y desesperanza, como si se tratase del último estallido de una vida que ya rodaba pendiente abajo.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren

“Se humedeció los labios. No sólo no había estado nunca enamorado, sino que tampoco tenía una gran afición a acostarse con mujeres. Nunca había podido apartar de su mente la idea de que era una estupidez hacerlo, de que se mantenía alejado, viéndose a sí mismo, objetivamente. En una ocasión, una terrible ocasión, le había dado por reírse.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren

“tenía la lengua apretada contra la parte superior de la boca, mientras pensaba que Anne era el sol que iluminaba sus tinieblas. Pero no se sentía capaz de expresarlo. Sólo pudo decirle: –No puedo decir...”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren

“Todas las cosas tenían un lado opuesto cerca de ellas; toda decisión un razonamiento en contra; todo animal, otro animal empeñado en destruirle, el macho a la hembra, lo positivo a lo negativo. La fisión del átomo era la única forma auténtica de destrucción, la ruptura de la ley universal de la inmutabilidad. Nada podía existir sin llevar lo opuesto íntimamente ligado. ¿Podía existir espacio en un edificio sin que hubiera objetos que lo interrumpiesen? ¿Podía existir la energía sin la materia, o la materia sin la energía? La materia y la energía, lo inerte y lo activo... antes consideradas como cosas opuestas, mientras que ahora se sabía que formaban una unidad.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren

“Pero el amor y el odio, pensaba ahora, el bien y el mal, vivían juntos en el corazón humano; en vez de hallarse distribuidos desproporcionalmente en los hombres, formaban una especie de bloques monolíticos, uno bueno y otro malo. No había más que buscar un poco de uno u otro para encontrar el todo, bastaba con escarbar en la superficie. Todas las cosas tenían un lado opuesto cerca de ellas; toda decisión un razonamiento en contra; todo animal, otro animal empeñado en destruirle, el macho a la hembra, lo positivo a lo negativo. La fisión del átomo era la única forma auténtica de destrucción, la ruptura de la ley universal de la inmutabilidad. Nada podía existir sin llevar lo opuesto íntimamente ligado. ¿Podía existir espacio en un edificio sin que hubiera objetos que lo interrumpiesen? ¿Podía existir la energía sin la materia, o la materia sin la energía? La materia y la energía, lo inerte y lo activo... antes consideradas como cosas opuestas, mientras que ahora se sabía que formaban una unidad.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Extraños en un tren