The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

by Truman Capote

She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the room, a shadow in the corner, whose presence is a delicate happening.

she held tight to it, as though inside she had captive a blue-haired child, a bewitched prince.

But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified.

“Was there ever a choice? It’s what I want, a choice. To know I could’ve had another life, all made of my own decisions. That would be making my peace, and truly.”

“Charlie said that love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because when you can love one thing,” she held the blue egg as preciously as the Judge had held a leaf, “you can love another, and that is owning, that is something to live with. You can forgive everything.

I’ve read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I know where to jump. After Dolly died I was a long while dangling. My own idea was to have a good time.

The floor of the room was a garbage pail of books begun but never finished, antique newspapers, even orange hulls, fruit cores, underwear, a spilled powder box.

“You talk about getting married as though it were the answer absolute; very well, up to a point I agree. Sure, I want to be loved; who the hell doesn’t? But even if I was willing to compromise, where is the man I’m going to marry? Believe me, he must’ve fallen down a manhole. I mean it seriously when I say there are no men in New York—and even if there were, how do you meet them? Every man I ever met here who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer. And anyway, this is no place to fall in love; this is where you ought to come when you want to get over being in love. Sure, I suppose I could marry somebody; but I do not want that? Do I?” Estelle shrugged. “Then what do you want?” “More than is coming to me.”

“No, Oreilly, that’s what it isn’t like. It hasn’t anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone. Oreilly, I tell you I haven’t an ambition, and there used to be so much. I don’t understand it and I don’t know what to do.”

poor baby, she has had her soul stolen.”

of all things this was saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one’s lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too; and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn’t.

“I’ll never be afraid again,” she said. “I hardly know what I was afraid of to begin with.” “The same things you’ll be afraid of the next time,”

I do not know what I want, and perhaps I shall never know, but my only wish from every star will always be another star;