Truman Capote

“It is well known that women outlive men; could it merely be superior vanity that keeps them going?”

“He had no thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.”

“He had no thought og how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.”

“I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.”

“I suppose you think I'm very brazen. Or très fou. Or something.'Not at all.'She seemed disappointed. 'Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don't mind. It's useful.”

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

“She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise she was perfect.”

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.”

“You don't understand. You've never hated anybody.No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.”

“all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.”

“My yardstick is how somebody treats me.”

“You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.”

“Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”

“Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.”

“It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two.”

“Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.”

“He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.”

“I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.”

“The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.”

“Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.”

“I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.”

“There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.”

“It’s like Tiffany’s,” she said. “Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds. I can’t wait.”

“I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”

“The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”

“The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.”

“our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.”

“There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.”

“I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.”

“I'll wager at the end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are -- her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone - just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

“Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.”

“What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quiteness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there”

“I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.”

“[F]or us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laugther; and with the garbage of liveliness stuffed down us untill our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying, in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”

“The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell. ”

“[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.”

“[C]locks indeed must have thier sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?”

“Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportian suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, 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.”

“We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.”

“The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.”

“I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.”

“Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.”

“You cold or something?' he said. She strained against him; she wanted to pass clear through him: 'It's a chill, it's nothing'; and then, pushing a little away: 'Say you love me.'I said it.'No, oh no. You haven't. I was listening. And you never do.'Well, give me time.'Please.'He sat up and glanced at a clock across the room. It was after five. Then decisively he pulled off his windbreaker and began to unlace his shoes.Aren't you going to, Clyde?'He grinned back at her. 'Yeah, I'm going to.'I don't mean that; and what's more, I don't like it: you sound as though you were talking to a whore.'Come off it, honey. You didn't drag me up here to tell you about love.'You disgust me,' she said.Listen to her! She's sore!'A silence followed that circulated like an aggrieved bird. Clyde said, 'You want to hit me, huh? I kind of like you when you're sore: that's the kind of girl you are,' which made Grady light in his arms when he lifted and kissed her. 'You still want me to say it?' Her head slumped on his shoulder. 'Because I will,' he said, fooling his fingers in her hair. 'Take off your clothes--and I'll tell it to you good.”

“Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.”

“Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.”

“He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....”

“Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.”

“What kind of things did you have in mind, kid?' Clyde said this with a smile that exposed a slight lewdness: the young man who laughed at seals and bought balloons had reversed his profile, and the new side, which showed a harsher angle, was the one Grady was never able to defend herself against: its brashness so attracted, so crippled her, she was left desiring only to appease.”