Truman Capote

It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. 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. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes.

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.

"Oh, you get used to anything," I said, annoyed with myself, for actually I was proud of the place.

"I don't. I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead." Her dispraising eyes surveyed the room again.

"That's not bad. I can't get excited by a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so much merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.

Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.

with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own

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

"The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change," she called, not teasing at all, "take my advice, darling: don't give her twenty-cents!"

so much my idea of comfort that I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating

"I don't. I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead."