Tom Ripley Quotes

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.

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.

Something always turned up. That was Tom's philosophy.

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.

Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.

Don’t you take the past and just put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there? That’s what I do. And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key. Say, “Open up, step inside.” But you can’t because it’s dark. And there are demons. — Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Odd, Tom thought, that some girls meant sadness and death. Some girls looked like sunlight, creativity, joy, but they really meant death, and not even because the girls were enticing their victims, in fact one might blame the boys for being deceived by—nothing at all, simply imagination.

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.

Tom was not good at math. He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another.

My God, Tom thought, plunge into a couple of soothing Goethe poems. Der Abschied or some such. A little German solidity, Goethian conviction of superiority and—maybe genius. That was what he needed.

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.

This was the clean slate he had thought about on the boat coming over from America. This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person.

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.

Frank felt guilt, which was why he had looked up Tom Ripley, and curiously Tom had never felt such guilt, never let it seriously trouble him. In this, Tom realized that he was odd. Most people would have experienced insomnia, bad dreams, especially after committing a murder such as that of Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom had not.

Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren’t good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed.

But Tom had known Dickie very well, and Frank had known his father. Hence the blackout, perhaps, or so Tom suspected. Anyway, Tom did not intend to pump the boy further.

Tom heard the door knocker. There was both knocker and bell, but Tom made no judgment about people who used one or the other.

Business. That had two meanings, Tom thought as he sipped his drink: industry, which it was, and phoniness, which by now half of it was.

The similarity, Tom realized, was that he had to ask both men whether they preferred to stop their inquiries or be killed.

It was the restless (even in a chair), doubting, troubled mood of it which pleased Tom; that and the fact that it was a phony. It had place of honor in his house.

But then—Tom’s spirits rose and consequently his self-confidence—maybe he could get a late afternoon plane today to Paris.

Tom painted landscapes and portraits mainly. He was ever trying to simplify, to keep the example of Matisse before him, but with little success, he thought.

Tom laughed, delighted with Heloise’s irreverent attitude, because it resembled his own. Her propriety was a veneer only, Tom knew, or surely she’d never have married him.

It’s wrong and it’s hopeless, and why should someone be reproached for not saying something, when he knows it’s no good to say it?” Tom paused.

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

Dickie Greenleaf. The beginning of his troubles, Tom thought. The first man he had killed, and the only one he regretted killing, really, the only crime he was sorry about.

Where did politeness end and insanity begin, or vice versa? Tom stood straight, reminding himself that courtesy and politeness were seldom a mistake, and dialed.

To Tom his practice, and the weekly visits and sessions with the Schubertly Roger Lepetit, were a form of discipline which he had come to love.

He was getting into enraged female territory, which scared Tom. Who could deal with it?

One black crow flew over with its ugly cry that made Tom wince, as if at cacophonous music.

Tom had a feeling of emptiness and abeyance that had driven him nearly mad until he made the trip to Munich in his car.

Heloise, you’re the only woman in the world who has ever made me think of now, Tom wanted to say, but he was too tired, and the remark was probably not important.

But Tom felt uncomfortable because he was lying, to Bernard. It was seldom Tom felt uncomfortable, lying.

Ripley’s announcement that I wasn’t going to be acting on one foot was my first glimpse into the future.

As usual, another person’s nervousness was making Tom feel calm.

There was indeed a screen between fact and memory, Tom realized, though he could not have given it a name. He could, of course, he thought a few seconds later, and it was self-preservation.

Just what did happen to a corpse under water for four, five years, even three? the tarpaulin or canvas would rot, perhaps more than half of it would disappear; the stones would likely have fallen out, therefore, enabling the corpse to drift more easily, even rise a little, provided any flesh was left. But wasn't rising due to bloating? Tom thought of the word maceration, the flaking off in layers of the outer skin. Then what? The nibbling of fish? Or wouldn't the current have removed pieces of flesh until nothing but bones were left? The bloated period must be long past...

When Pat gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley’s character — endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money) — she was turning the material of the ‘comic book’ upside down and making it into something very like a ‘tragic book.’ 'It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,’ Pat wrote in her diary– and everywhere else.

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.

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 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.

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.

Derwatt was from some dreary northern industrial town, Tom forgot which. It was the talking up that had done it, Tom realized. Curious. But then van Gogh had suffered from the lack of talking up. Who had talked Vincent up? No one, maybe only Theo.

Tom loved the little shops interspersed with entrances to flats, the polished brass slits in the doors for letters, even the cozy late-night deli, well-lit and with fresh fruit, canned goods, shelves of bread and cereals and open at nearly midnight.

Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive or self-destructive attitude. What was tragedy for one man was not for another, if he could assume the right attitude toward it.

In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.

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.

Chris had something better than manners, Tom saw, which was sensitivity. Tom was fascinated by the candlelight through the irises of his blue eyes, because so often Dickie’s eyes had looked the same late at night in Mongibello, or in some candlelit restaurant in Naples.

Tom found it amusing, strangely nervous-making, Chris’s enthusiasm. Tom remembered his own mad joy—though there’d been no one for him to speak to—at his first glimpse of the Leaning Tower of Pisa from a moving train, his first view of the curving lights of Cannes’ shore.

Tom felt his wrath mounting, and proceeded to tell Ed and Jeff about the house the Pritchards had rented, by way of letting off steam. Tom described the pseudo-antique furniture, and the pond in the lawn on which the afternoon sun shimmered, making designs on the living-room ceiling.

The row of shoes on the floor of his closet caught Tom’s eye. All shined to perfection! All lined up like soldiers! He had never seen such a gleam on the Gucci loafers, such a deep glow in the cordovans. Even his patent leather evening slippers, with their silly grosgrain bows, had new highlights.

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 did not want to take his eyes from her. She had not lost or gained weight, he thought, and the curve of her thighs under the pale blue trousers seemed things of beauty, works of art. Her voice, as she chattered on, half in French and half in English, about Morocco, was music to him, more delicious than Scarlatti.

how everything about Pritchard irked him, even the wristwatch, the stretchable gold-bracelet variety, expensive and flashy, with gold case for the watch, gold-colored face even, suitable for a pimp, Tom thought. Tom preferred infinitely his conservative Patek Philippe on a brown leather strap, which looked like an antique.

No, Tom didn’t think Frenchwomen were more difficult than other women, but they had their own idea of the respect with which they should be treated. This subject did not make much progress, because every woman wanted to be treated with a certain respect, and though Tom knew Heloise’s kind, he absolutely could not put it into words.

How was Frank ever going to achieve the big justification, which would take away all his guilt? He might never find a total justification, but he had to find an attitude. Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive attitude or self-destructive attitude.

In a childish way Tom had avoided Venice simply because he expected to be disappointed in it. He had thought only sentimentalists and American tourists raved over Venice, and that at best it was only a town for honeymooners who enjoyed the inconvenience of not being able to go anywhere except by a gondola moving at two miles an hour.

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,

Tom straightened, glancing at the door, but the door had not opened. That had been the only time tonight when he had felt uncomfortable, unreal, the way he might have felt if he had been lying, yet it had been practically the only thing he had said that was true: My parents died when I was very small. I was raised by my aunt in Boston.

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.

During the ten-day voyage Tom lived in a peculiar atmosphere of doom and of heroic, unselfish courage. He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.

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.

He put his fingertips together and stared into space, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes reflecting, an unconscious gesture perhaps, because he had been thinking of a certain Sherlock Holmes story which resembled this situation. Tom hoped his disguise would not be seen through so easily. At any rate, it was better than some of those exploded by Sir Arthur—when a nobleman forgot to remove his diamond ring or some such.

If the sixty percent (Tom estimated) of Derwatt works now extant were to be signed B. Tufts, why would they be less valuable? The answer, of course, was because they had been marketed dishonestly, their market value, ever climbing and climbing still, based on the value of Derwatt’s name, which in fact had had little value when he died, because Derwatt had not been much known. But Tom had been at this impasse before.

Like many young people, the lesson Tom had learned from his failure was that he wasn't good at math, and that he should stay away from it whenever possible. He didn't know, back in high school, how central math was to philosophy and music, two subjects he loved. He didn't know math could be cosmically beautiful, and it was something he could master with hard work, time, and persistence, just the way he'd mastered Chekhov.

Ah, gone were the days—and had there ever been many?—when he had written a postcard from Europe to Aunt Dottie, Tom admitted to himself, with the purpose of keeping in her good graces in order to inherit something. She had bequeathed him ten thousand dollars but had given her house, which Tom had liked and had had some hopes of acquiring, to another person, whose name Tom had forgotten, perhaps because he wanted to forget.

As for books, Tom was glad to have Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde as bedtime reading that night. He was enjoying every paragraph. Something about Oscar’s life, reading it, was like a purge, man’s fate encapsulated; a man of goodwill, of talent, whose gifts to human pleasure remained considerable, had been attacked and brought low by the vindictiveness of hoi polloi, who had taken sadistic pleasure in watching Oscar brought low.

What is funny? I should think it is not very funny for you as an American,” said Eric, trying to be light, but at his most Germanic. He had been talking about the falling dollar, and the inadequate policies of President Carter, as compared with the sagacious housekeeping of Helmut Schmidt’s government. “Sorry,” Tom said, “I was thinking of Schmidt’s or somebody’s remark—‘The financial affairs of America are now in the hands of rank amateurs.

Probably, Tom thought, a healthy drive toward self-preservation was preventing Frank from going back in thought to that very moment. And Tom had to admit to himself that he would not care to analyze or relive the seven or eight murders he had committed, the worst undoubtedly having been the first, that of Dickie Greenleaf, beating that young man to death with the blade or the butt of an oar. There was always a curious secret, as well as a horror, about taking the life of another being.

If he'd only gotten his sight-seeing done all by himself, Tom thought, if he only hadn't been in such a hurry and so greedy, if he only hadn't misjudged the relationship between Dickie and Marge so stupidly, or had simply waited for them to separate of their own volition, then none of this would have happened, and he could have lived with Dickie for the rest of his like, travelled and lived and enjoyed living for the rest of his life! If he only hadn't put on Dickie's clothes that day—

Had he ever been on a camel? Tom wasn’t quite sure, even though the discomfort of being lifted up high seemed so real, so within his memory, that he felt it had happened. He would hate it. It would be something like looking down at a swimming pool while standing on a diving board five or six meters above the surface of the water. Jump! Why should he? Had anybody ever commanded him to jump? At summer camp? Tom wasn’t sure. Sometimes his imagination was as clear as a remembered experience.

Tom was curious about the Cynthia connection. That was a can of worms, if the Pritchards or anybody else—especially Cynthia Gradnor, who knew as well as the Buckmaster Gallery people that the last sixty-odd “Derwatts” were forgeries—ever opened it, and told the truth. No use trying to put the lid back on, because all those very expensive paintings would become next to worthless, except for eccentric collectors who were amused by good forgeries; like Tom, in fact, but how many people in the world were like him, with a cynical attitude toward justice and veracity?

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 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.

Tom said nothing as he listened to her and tasted bile in his mouth. “I know what it is like to be alone, Tom,” she said. Her tone

Do not attempt to stop me,” Tom spat. “I will go and awaken. Outside of this house is sanity. Within it, destruction. Madness. Lunacy.

But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction-and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form-is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.

A selfish, stupid bastard who had sneered at one of his best friends—Dickie certainly was one of his best friends—just because he suspected him of sexual deviation. Tom laughed at that 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.