If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realized she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. High smith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathize. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his selfless', yet realized that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'deal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.
— Andrew Wilson
Patricia Highsmith
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