Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Quotes (37 Quotes)

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

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.

She's such a goddamn liar maybe she don't know herself anymore.

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

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

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.

Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that's why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

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

My yardstick is how somebody treats me.

As Miss Golightly was saying, before she was so rudely interrupted...

You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

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

But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.

You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it.

I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.

Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine.

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away.

Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.

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.

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.

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

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.