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a37c604
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The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.
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Truman Capote |
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e68d2ec
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My yardstick is how somebody treats me.
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Truman Capote |
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828fcdd
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Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
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Truman Capote |
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7253d11
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There's got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.
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Truman Capote |
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8ac095a
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I suppose you think I'm very brazen. Or tres fou. Or something.' Not at all.' She seemed disappointed. 'Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don't mind. It's useful.
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Truman Capote |
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b695df1
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He'd always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist.
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shut-a-final-door
o-henry-memorial
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Truman Capote |
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60946a3
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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.
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Truman Capote |
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553e4b3
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But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pinewoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair hard dried, after the sun had gone and there were l..
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Truman Capote |
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118fcfd
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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.
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love
hypocrites
hell
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Truman Capote |
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fb7997a
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I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.
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Truman Capote |
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4739929
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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.
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human
life
description
summer
city
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Truman Capote |
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4a74285
|
What we want most is only to be held...and told...that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama's long hair, is being afraid, and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)...everything is going to be all right.
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Truman Capote |
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aa779f5
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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.
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Truman Capote |
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65a8c2e
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But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.
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Truman Capote |
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8f18bb7
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Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.
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Truman Capote |
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afbce8c
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She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.
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paradox
ugliness
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Truman Capote |
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acddaca
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My, how foolish I am! You know what I've always thought? I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'l..
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Truman Capote |
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f8089df
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But I know what I like.' She smiled, and et the cat drop to the floor. 'It's like Tiffany's,'she said. 'Not that I give a hoot about jewellery. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky.
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Truman Capote |
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04b6990
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Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.
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Truman Capote |
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525adf0
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There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.
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Truman Capote |
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0bebd84
|
I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.
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Truman Capote |
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15327cc
|
Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky.
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Truman Capote |
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02385a1
|
Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
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Truman Capote |
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4141175
|
And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. 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 towards heaven.
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Truman Capote |
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1be076b
|
He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.
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Truman Capote |
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b8a0e2e
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But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task...' It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.
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Truman Capote |
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b45eecc
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Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matte..
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nature
trees
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Truman Capote |
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3b69f49
|
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.
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groomed
luster
fashion
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Truman Capote |
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d772b52
|
She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.
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Truman Capote |
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d7e6c6c
|
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 S..
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winter
snow
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Truman Capote |
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e329957
|
Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin - deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.
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Truman Capote |
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f2a8f18
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It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.
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Truman Capote |
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84b499a
|
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.
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Truman Capote |
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69eb7f4
|
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.
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Truman Capote |
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1e4cfd6
|
The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.
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Truman Capote |
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22a2b04
|
Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.
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Truman Capote |
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42519e2
|
I believe in hanging. Just so long as I'm not the one being hanged.
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Truman Capote |
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34abe45
|
Imagination, of course, can open any door--turn the key and let terror walk right in.
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Truman Capote |
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86f2959
|
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
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highway
santa-fe
trains
water
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Truman Capote |
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c6816d0
|
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.
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marriage
women
|
Truman Capote |
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98c6adb
|
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.
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Truman Capote |
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81be1a2
|
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."
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Truman Capote |
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23e2fa9
|
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."
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Truman Capote |
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7cf2999
|
There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that's a bad sign...It's terrible. Psychologically it's crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it's the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they're trying to esta..
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tattooing
tattoos
|
Truman Capote |