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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.

You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.

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

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.

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.

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

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

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.

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

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.