The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories Quotes

“...of all things this was the 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.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“If some wizard would like to give me a present, let him give me a bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and the fire whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary smells . . .”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“But, ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Dolly said that when she was a girl she’d liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he’d died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us—it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields—I’ve heard Papa clear as day. On”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“So little, once it has changed, changes back.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“I'll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“I've been other things beside a clown. I have sold insurance, too.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“If you are not admired no one will take the trouble to disapprove.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“It's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp. . .
If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist cemetery. . . below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows light firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices. . .
It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story -- it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.”
― truman capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“she seemed to be moving forward into the future, while I, unable to follow, was left with my sameness.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“The police said for Oreilly to get to his feet.

"Certainly," Oreilly said, "though I do think it shocking you have to trouble yourself with such petty crimes as mine when everywhere there are master thieves afoot.

"For instance, this pretty child," he stepped between the officers and pointed at Sylvia, "she is the recent victim of a major theft; poor baby, she has had her soul stolen.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“the wind is us—it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields—I”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Preacher spit on the ground and swaggered over to Billy Bob. Come on, he said, just as though nothing had happened, She's a hard one, she is, she don't want nothing but to make trouble between two good friends. For a moment it looked as if Billy Bob was going to join him in a peaceful togetherness; but suddenly, coming to his senses, he drew back and made a gesture. The boys regarded each other a full minute, all the closeness between them turning an ugly color: you can't hate so much unless you love, too.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“To hell with all that, began the Sheriff, and was again interrupted by Mrs. Buster, who said that under no circumstances would she tolerate swearing: will we Reverend? and the Reverend, backing her up, said he'd be damned if they would.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers—men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world—but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“we skidded long enough for a detailed review of our lives.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“a person to whom everything can be said. Am I an idiot to want such a thing? But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree. A great piece of luck provided we know how to use it: no longer any need to worry about the picture we present—free to find out who we truly are. If we know that no one can dislodge us; it’s the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences. By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers—men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world—but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets. This is my chance to find that man—you are him, Miss Dolly, Riley, all of you.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“He went back upstairs, and sat at his desk, and felt as though he were bleeding inside, and wished very much to believe in God.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“believe she became what he’d wanted, the one person in the world—to whom, as he’d described it, everything can be said. But when everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“whom everything can be said. Am I an idiot to want such a thing? But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.”
― Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories