Patricia Highsmith Quotes

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking

What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.

No man loveth his fetters, be they made of gold.

You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.

You can cage the songbird, but you can't make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you'll have to clip her wings.

A caged canary is safe but not free.

I'll have to keep looking for more of them, more brief moments of freedom in a world that refuses to allow it.

Freedom is too enormous to be slipped under a closet door.

I can almost see what Gabriel meant when he asked, 'What has the free world got that you can’t get here?' Almost. Freedom, Gabriel. That’s what you can’t get here.

Only the man who has known freedom Can define his prison.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

I have never in my life walked with a harness. The weight of the tether, makes it feel like I'm dragging an anchor behind me.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

See, it's no in between: you're either free or you're a slave.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

I don't want to be limited or ghettoized in any way.