Truman Capote Quotes

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.

I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists.

If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.

Darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

There are other things besides beauty with which to captivate the hearts of men. The Italians have a saying: "Fair is not fair, but that which pleaseth.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity.

Those who do not know what love is liken it to beauty. Those who claim to know what love is liken it to ugliness.

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

You can meet people who are really beautiful. Then, when you see them angry for the first time, all of a sudden they're not beautiful anymore. They didn't just step into the other room and have plastic surgery; they're still the same physically. It's just that something inside of them has changed. They're no longer attractive.

Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, monster incomprehensible, raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.