Love should be allowed.

Took a brief break from all my history and foreign policy books to read a collection of short stories by Truman Capote, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His writing is everything writing should be—baldly honest, utterly unpretentious, sparkling with quiet humor.

“I think you could get in a lot of trouble,” I said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.

Morning was in the room.

I love that.

And this—

He’d been put together with care, his brown head and bullfighter’s figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right.

And this—

“No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Because I DO love Jose—I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds.”

And—

She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate’s cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds.

And—

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. 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… There was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so… She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.