Other Voices, Other Rooms (Vintage International)

by Truman Capote

Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

there were voices in the walls, settling sighs of stone and board, sounds on the edge of silence.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only. Now at thirteen Joel was nearer a knowledge of death than in any year to come: a flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.

Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all.

What we most want is only to be held … and told … that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa’s eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama’s long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall) … everything is going to be all right.

it is easy to escape daylight, but night is inevitable, and dreams are the giant cage.

“But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? ‘We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task …’ It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.”

dew of snowflakes scenting her hair;

Gusts of autumn, exhaling through the inheriting weeds, grieved for the cruel velvet children and their virile bearded fathers: Was, said the weeds, Gone, said the sky, Dead, said the woods, but the full laments of history were left to the Whippoorwill.