Truman Capote

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous.

That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.

I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like."

You know those days when you've got the mean reds?"

"Same as the blues?"

"No," she said slowly. "No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is. You've had that feeling?"

"Quite often. Some people call it angst."

who, like many short men in the presence of tall women, had an aspiring mist in his eye.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

"It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural."

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring; which is how I felt sitting with Holly on the railings of the boathouse porch. I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.

But really, darling, you made such a tragedy out of your childhood I didn't feel I should compete.

It was near the antique shop with the palace of a bird cage in its window, so I took her there to see it, and she enjoyed the point, its fantasy: "But still, it's a cage."