‘Is that the end?‘ she asked,...

‘Is that the end?‘ she asked, waking up. She floundered for something more to say. ‘Of course I like dykes themselves. They don‘t scare me a bit. But stories about dykes bore the bejesus out of me. I just can‘t put myself in their shoes. Well really, darling,‘ she said, because I was clearly puzzled, ‘if it‘s not about a couple of old bull-dykes, what the hell is it about?‘ - P25

‘Incidentally,‘ she said, ‘do you happen to know any nice lesbians? I‘m looking for a room-mate. Well, don‘t laugh. I‘m so disorganized, I simply can‘t afford a maid; and really, dykes are wonderful homemakers, they love to do all the work, you never have to bother about brooms and defrosting and sending out the laundry. I had a room-mate in Hollywood, she played in Westerns, they called her the Lone Ranger; but I‘ll say this for her, she was better than a man around the house. Of course people couldn‘t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on. Look at the Lone Ranger, married twice. Usually dykes only get married once, just for the name. It seems to carry such cachet later on to be called Mrs Something Another. That‘s not true!‘ She was staring at an alarm clock on the table. ‘It can‘t be four-thirty!‘ - P26

At any rate she no longer rang my bell. I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fetched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend. A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet. - P33

Even when she‘s wearing glasses this thick;even when she opens her mouth and you don‘t know if she‘s a hillbilly or an Okie or what. I still don‘t. My guess, nobody‘ll ever know where she came from.
She‘s such a goddamn liar, maybe she don‘t know herself any more. But it took us a year to smooth out that accent. How we did it finally, we gave her French lessons: after she could imitate French, it wasn‘t so long she could imitate English. We modelled her along the Margaret Sullavan type, but she could pitch some curves of her own, people were interested, big ones, and to top it all, Benny Polan, a respected guy, Benny wants to marry her. An agent could ask for more? Then wham! The Story of Dr Wassell. - P38

‘What scandals are you spreading, O.J.?‘
Holly splashed into the room, a towel more or less wrapped round her and her wet feet dripping footmarks on the floor. - P39

I was left abandoned by the bookshelves; of the books there, more than half were about horses, the rest baseball. Pretending an interest in Horseflesh and How to Tell It gave me sufficiently private opportunity for sizing Holly‘s friends. - P41

But he‘s got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have beengood: they wouldn‘t and I wouldn‘t. If I do feel guilty,
I guess it‘s because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn‘t dreaming a bit. I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I‘d never be a movie star. It‘s too hard; and if you‘re intelligent, it‘s too embarrassing. My complexes aren‘t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it‘s essential not to have any ego at all. I don‘tmean I‘d mind being rich and famous. - P45

She was still hugging the cat. ‘Poor slob,‘ she said,
tickling his head, ‘poor slob without a name. It‘s a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven‘t any right to give him one: he‘ll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don‘t belong to each other:he‘s an independent, and so am I. 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.‘ She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. ‘It‘s like Tiffany‘s,‘
she said. - P46

Also, she had a cat and she p...

Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-stripedtom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breakingtones of a boy‘s adolescent voice. - P19

But our acquaintance did not make headway until September, an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it. I‘d been to a movie, come home, and gone to bed with a bourbon nightcap and the newest Simenon: so much my idea of comfort that I couldn‘t understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating. It was a feeling I‘d read about, written about, but never before experienced. The feeling of being watched. Of someone in the room. Then: an abrupt rapping at the window, a glimpse of ghostly grey: I spilled the bourbon. It was some little while before I could bring myself to open the window, and ask Miss Golightly what she wanted. - P20

‘Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I‘ve got a gall barging in on you like this. But that fire escape was damned icy. And you looked so cosy. Like my brother Fred. We used to sleep four in a bed, and he was the only one that ever let me hug him on a cold night. By the way, do you mind if I call you Fred?‘
She‘d come completely into the room now, and she paused there, staring at me. I‘d never seen her before not wearing dark glasses, and it was obvious now that they were prescription lenses, for without them her eyes had an assessing squint, like a jeweller‘s. They were large eyes, a little blue, a little green, dotted with bits of brown: vari-coloured, like her hair; and, like her hair, they gave out a lively warm light.
‘I suppose you think I‘m very brazen. Or très fou. Or something.‘
‘Not at all.‘
She seemed disappointed. ‘Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don‘t mind. It‘s useful.‘ - P21

‘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. ‘What do you do here all day?‘ - P22

"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. Isimply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. How old is W. Somerset Maugham?‘ - P22

As they sang they took turns ...

As they sang they took turns spin-dancing a girl over the cobbles under the El; and the girl, Miss Golightly, to be sure, floated round in their arms light as a scarf. - P18

The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. 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. - P19

[오늘의 한문장] Breakfast at Tiffany's

"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!‘ - P16

[오늘의 한문장] The New York Trilogy

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell. - P68