I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.
Truman CapoteRead
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the profound isolation and loneliness individuals experience in a world that often suppresses genuine connection and emotion.
Truman Capote's quote delves into the depths of human loneliness and the struggle for emotional expression in a society that often ridicules vulnerability. It emphasizes the pain of isolation, where genuine tenderness is stifled, leading to a sense of despair that overshadows life's joys. The imagery of death pulling like a wind suggests an overwhelming sense of gloom, while the metaphor of dying in rented rooms captures the transient nature of human existence and connections that are often superficial or temporary.
Themes
LonelinessIsolationTendernessDeathConnectionDespair
In practice
Example use cases
Opening a discussion on mental health and the importance of emotional vulnerability in a community seminar.
More from Truman Capote
All quotes →All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.
Truman CapoteRead
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
Truman CapoteRead
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
Truman CapoteRead
I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
Truman CapoteRead
The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.
Truman CapoteRead
Similar quotes
Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?
SophoclesRead
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
Sam HarrisRead
How interesting it would be to write the story of the experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfill those demands. The deeds of the preceding life give direction to the present life.
Leo TolstoyRead
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
Kurt VonnegutRead
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
Samuel JohnsonRead
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Eugene H. PetersonRead