Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory

by Truman Capote

her smooth wood eyes

Vivid

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

Romantic

next to a church where a blue tower-clock tolls the hours.

Phalic? Not wantjng to touch holly but lovingher. Time passing. Tower clocl knstead of clock tower

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.

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

were always torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.

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 had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.

Of course people couldn’t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on. Look at the Lone Ranger, married twice. Usually dykes only get married once, just for the name.

I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fetched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend. 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.

But I’ll tell you the truth. You can beat your brains out for her, and she’ll hand you horseshit on a platter.

Brain picks her all the time

She says you got to want it to be good and I don’t want

There’re 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.

But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of.

The reds

She was well over six feet, taller than most men there. They straightened their spines, sucked in their stomachs; there was a general contest to match her swaying height.

who gobbled up her stammered jokes like popcorn tossed to pigeons.

Popcorn and stuttering sound

because if you’re going to have a roommate, and she isn’t a dyke, then the next best thing is a perfect fool,

obscurely governmental, vaguely important,

Just like me