Ripley's Game Quotes

I've thought of a wonderful way to start a forest fire,' Tom said musingly as they were having coffee.

There's no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That's just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That's different.

Sunlight came through the windows slowly, like something liquid pouring between the red curtains on to the rug. The sunlight was like an arpeggio that Tom could almost hear -- this time Chopin, perhaps.

Simone was just a trifle ashamed of herself, Tom thought. In that, she joined much of the rest of the world.

All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean.

Tom sat at the harpsichord, playing the base of a Goldberg variation, trying to get the fingering in his head and in his hand. He had bought a few music books in Paris the same day he had acquired the harpsichord.

Death would probably have a sweeter, more seductive pull, like a wave sweeping out from a shore, sucking hard at the legs of a swimmer who’d already ventured too far, and who mysteriously had lost his will to struggle.

Now they were beside his car. “I’m the worrying type. You’d never think so, would you? I try to think of the worst before it happens. Not quite the same as being pessimistic.” Tom smiled. “You going home? I’ll drop you off.

They walked along an embankment of the Isar, where there were children in prams, stone apartment buildings, a pharmacy, a grocery shop, all the appurtenances of living of which Jonathan felt not in the least a part that morning.

Tom lit a cigar, not so much because he craved a cigar as because a cigar gave him a sense of stability, perhaps illusory, but it was the illusion, the attitude toward problems that counted. One simply had to have a confident attitude.

Love, in a real and not a merely romantic sense, love that he had no control over, had miraculously rescued him. In a way, he felt that it had rescued him from death, but he realized that he meant that love had taken the terror out of death.

What profiteth it a man— Jonathan could have laughed. He hadn’t gained the whole world, nor had he lost his soul. Anyway, Jonathan didn’t believe in a soul. Self-respect was more like it. He hadn’t lost his self-respect, only Simone. Simone was morale, however, and wasn’t morale self-respect?

Tom was vaguely ashamed of himself, in fact, for having got Jonathan into it, and so coming to Jonathan’s aid relieved a bit of Tom’s guilt. Yes, if all went well, Trevanny would be a lucky and much happier man, Tom was thinking, and Tom believed in positive thinking. Don’t hope, think the best, and things would work out for the best,

My God, the taint! Well, yes, he had the taint, all right. Worse, he had killed people. True. Dickie Greenleaf. That was the taint, the real crime. Hotheadedness of youth. Nonsense! It had been greed, jealousy, resentment of Dickie. And of course Dickie’s death—rather his murder—had caused Tom to kill the American slob called Freddie Miles.

A single person hadn’t the mental equipment to take on the problems of another and maintain the same degree of excellence, Tom thought. Then Tom reflected that his own welfare was tied up with Jonathan’s after all, and if Jonathan cracked up—but Tom couldn’t imagine Jonathan saying to anyone that Tom had been on the train with him, helping him.

I'm okay,' Tom said in a quiet, deep voice. 'I don't know what was the matter. Must have been the heat that got me for a minute.' He laughed a little. That was reality, laughing it off, making it silly, something that was more important than anything that had happened to him in the five weeks since he had met Dickie, maybe that had ever happened to him.

Why did everyone—even Jonathan—suppose that he could come up with an idea for them? Tom often thought he had a hard enough time trying to steer a course for himself. His own welfare often required ideas, those inspirations that came sometimes while he was under the shower, or gardening, those gifts of the gods that were presented only after his own anxious pondering.

Tom had an unpleasant vision of the ubiquitous Mafia, like black cockroaches darting everywhere, coming from everywhere. If he fled his house, getting Heloise and Mme. Annette out before him or with him, the Mafia might simply set fire to Belle Ombre. Tom thought of the harpsichord burning, or going up in pieces from a bomb. Tom admitted that he had a love of house and home usually found only in women.

Tom had foreseen this happening. He was aware of his reputation, that many people mistrusted him, avoided him. Tom had often thought that his ego could have been shattered long ago—the ego of the average person would have been shattered—except for the fact that people, once they got to know him, once they came to Belle Ombre and spent an evening, liked him and Heloise well enough, and the Ripleys were invited back.

Charlestonians had a particularly vicious and cunning game, developed after the War. They treated outsiders with so much graciousness and consideration that their politeness became a weapon. 'Visitors end up feeling as if they're wearing shoes for the first time in their lives. It's said that only the strongest ever recover from the experience. The Chinese never developed a torture to match it, although they're a very subtle people.