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

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.

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

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

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.

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

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

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.

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

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.