Truman Capote

“And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself.”

“There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it's the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin - it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby - or a flawed one, for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow. And the only redhead I've ever seen with a complexion to compare with hers was Pamela Churchill's. But then, Pam is English, she grew up saturated with dewy English mists, something every dermatologist ought to bottle.”

“Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.”

“And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty - a prettiness marred by her seeing to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain.”

“Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn't develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways - it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men "on the muscle," as they say in horse-breeding circles.”

“As truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion - but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion) and of the two, the illusion is the truer.”

“That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.”

“Is it - I'm not certain - possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn't the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle - sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial, human: the difference between that and truly using another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters.”

“I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners - whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter.The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us - those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us.”

“Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn't a sense of humor? - and she has none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist.”

“Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty's, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I'd met when he photographed me for Boaty's magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, "The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking." Garbo, after a mournful pause, "Ah, if only I could say the same.")”

“Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)”

“I massaged and trained in figure and facial exercises - although facial exercises are a lot of crap; the only effective one is cocksucking. No joke, there's nothing like it for firming the jawline.”

“In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore - there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate.”

“You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.”

“Unfortunately, one mirror is as treacherous as another, reflecting at some point in every adventure the same vain unsatisfied face, and so when she asks what have I done? she means really what am I doing? as one usually does.”

“He left soon afterwards, leaving her alone in the dark room, illuminated time to time by shocking leaps of heat lightning, and she thought, now it will rain, and it never did, and she thought, now he will come, and he never did. She lighted cigarettes, letting them die between her lips, and the hours, thorned, crucifying, waited with her, and listened as she listened: but he was not coming.”

“Grady felt a chill echo, the kind that comes when, in an original situation, one has the sensation of its all having occurred before: if we know the past, and live the present, is it possible that we dream the future?”

“Ida, dear, please, do I complain? It is right a child should not love the mama the way the mama loves the child; children are ashamed of the love a mama has for them: that is part of it. But when a boy grows into a man it is right his time should be for other ladies.”

“Clyde's mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone who had spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this.”

“She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she'd forgotten to grease, and said, "Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.”

“She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.”

“I like to listen, and I like to talk. Heavens, girl, can't you see I like to talk?”

“That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”

“I'll never disgrace myself. And I swear, it never crossed my mind about Holly. You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.”

“It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course.”

“No hay que entregarles el corazón a los seres salvajes: cuanto más se lo entregas, más fuertes se hacen. Hasta que se sienten lo suficientemente fuertes como para huir al bosque.”

“Una inquietante soledad se filtró en mi vida, pero no me produjo ningún deseo de buscar a mis amigos más antiguos, que ahora me parecían una dieta sin sal ni azúcar.”

“Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.”

“A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit.”

“There's the one and only T.C. There was nobody like me before, and there ain't gonna be anybody like me after I'm gone...”

“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself--in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.”

“Τα περισσότερα μυστικά δε θα’ πρεπε να λέγονται ποτέ, κυρίως όμως εκείνα που είναι πιο απειλητικά γι΄αυτόν που τα’ ακούει παρά για κείνον που τα λέει.”

“Es ist sehr leicht den Regen zu ignorieren, wenn man einen Regenmantel hat.”

“No se enamore nunca de ninguna criatura salvaje, Mr. Bell- le aconsejó Holly-. Esa fue la equivocación de Doc. Siempre llevaba a su casa seres salvajes. Halcones con el ala rota. Otra vez trajo un lince rojo con una pata fracturada. Pero no hay que entregarles el corazón a los seres salvajes: cuanto más se lo entregas, más fuertes se hacen. Hasta que se siente lo suficientemente fuertes para huir al bosque. O subirse volando a un árbol. Y luego a otro árbol más alto. Y luego al cielo...-”

“If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.”

“She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.”

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”

“you got to want it to be good, and I don't want it.”

“there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.”

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

“For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of the cheeks.”

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.”

“You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.”

“Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.”

“...Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”

“Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”

“(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods.”

“I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.”

“I dream of eagles and bring forth sparrows.”