In Cold Blood quotes are important because they provide insight into the characters, motivations, and themes.
They offer a unique perspective on the novel’s tragic events and help illustrate the complexity of human nature.
Explore the timeless themes and characters of Truman Capote’s classic novel, In Cold Blood.
In Cold Blood Quotes With Page Numbers Part One: The Last To See Them Alive
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, (The Narrator), Page 3
“Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, (The Narrator), Page 5
“Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, (The Narrator), Pages 10-11
“Time rarely weighed upon him, for he had many methods of passing it.”
~Capote Truman, In Cold Blood, (The Narrator), Page 15
“One day she told the class, ‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’ ”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 25
“Scrubbed, combed, as tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date, they went out to the car.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 32
“We learn to do by doing.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 34
“The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 42
“You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you can learn how to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 43
“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quiet sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 43
“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they’re fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself–in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Pages 43-44
“He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 44
“You pursue the negative,” Willie-Jay had informed him once, in one of his lectures. “You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Pages 44-45
“You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 45
“The midnight hours were her time to be selfish and vain”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 56
“[Mrs. Clare] is a gaunt, trouser-wearing, woolen-shirted, cowboy-booted, ginger-colored, gingery-tempered woman of unrevealed age (“That’s for me to know, and you to guess”) but promptly revealed opinions, most of which are announced in a voice of rooster-crow altitude and penetration.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 67
“A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 68
“All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 69
“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 69
In Cold Blood Part Two Quotes: Persons Unknown
“Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 88
“Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 92
“As long as you live, there’s always something waiting; and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Character: the narrator, Page 92
“Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”‘
“Did what?”
“Out there.”
Dick dropped the binoculars into a leather case, a luxurious receptacle initialed H. W. C. He was annoyed. Annoyed as hell. Why the hell couldn’t Perry shut up? Christ Jesus, what damn good did it do, always dragging the goddam thing up? It really was annoying. Especially since they’d agreed, sort of, not to talk about the goddam thing. Just forget it.
“There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that,” Perry said.
“Deal me out, baby,” Dick said. “I’m a normal.” And Dick meant what he said.
He thought himself as balanced, as sane as anyone – maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that’s all. But Perry – there was, in Dick’s opinion, “something wrong” with Little Perry.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 108
“There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did. ”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 108
“Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was “having a bad spell,” Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. (“When I was a girl,” she had once told a friend, “I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough…”)”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Pages 121-122
“It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 140
“In school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 141
“You are a human being with a free will. Which puts you above the animal level. But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman—you are as an animal—“an”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 142
“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn’t a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”
~Truman Capote , In Cold Blood, Page 144
“It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 144
“Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 144
“Be consistent in your attitude towards her and do not add anything to the impression she has that you are weak, not because you need her good-will but because you can expect more letters like this, and they can only serve to increase your already dangerous anti-social instincts.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 145
“My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 146
“They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 185
“The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 200
“I despise people who can’t control themselves.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 202
“Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. “Wow!” he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride–the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes–from two-fifty to four-fifteen–and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he’d sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 222
In Cold Blood Part Three Quotes: Answer
I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Softspoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 244
“The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 245
“Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey’s silence. It had been his ambition to learn “exactly what happened in that house that night.” Twice now he’d been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger – with, rather, a measure of sympathy – for Perry Smith’s life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey’s sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged – hanged back to back.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Pages 245-246
“How much money did you get from the Clutters?’
‘Between forty and fifty dollars.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 246
“But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrol-men, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 248
In Cold Blood Part Four Quotes: The Corner
“I’ve tried to believe, but I don’t, I can’t, and there’s no use pretending.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 262
“The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 265
“Those fellows, they’re always crying over the killers. Never a thought for the victims.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 267
“Dick loves to steal. It’s an emotional thing with him – a sickness. I’m a thief too, but only if I don’t have the money to pay. Dick, if he was carrying a hundred dollars in his pocket, he’d steal a stick of chewing gum.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 290
“Two features in his personality make-up stand out as particularly pathological. The first is his ‘paranoid’ orientation toward the world. He is suspicious and distrustful of others, tends to feel that others discriminate against him, and feels that others are unfair to him and do not understand him. He is overly sensitive to criticism that others make of him, and cannot tolerate being made fun of. He is quick to sense slight or insult in things others say, and frequently may misinterpret well-meant communications. He feels the great need of friendship and understanding, but he is reluctant to confide in others, and when he does, expects to be misunderstood or even betrayed. In evaluating the intentions and feelings of others, his ability to separate the real situation from his own mental projections is very poor. He not infrequently groups all people together as being hypocritical, hostile, and deserving of whatever he is able to do to them. Akin to this first trait is the second, an ever -present, poorly controlled rage— easily triggered by any feelings of being tricked, slighted, or labeled inferior by others. For the most part, his rages in the past have been directed at authority figures.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 297
“I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 336
“…he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry…”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 343
“Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”
~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Page 343
In Cold Blood Short Summary
In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote, is a groundbreaking nonfiction novel that chronicles the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas.
The novel comprises interviews with the family, acquaintances, and law enforcement involved in the investigation.
It also includes research and narrative to provide a vivid and detailed account of the events leading up to, during, and after the murders.
Capote’s ability to create a compelling story with the constraints of nonfiction has made In Cold Blood a timeless classic.
The novel provides an insight into the lives of the two killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, and their motives.
It also gives readers a deeper understanding of the victims and how their deaths affected the community. In Cold Blood is an iconic work that is still read today.
It has also inspired film adaptations and other works of fiction. In Cold Blood is an unforgettable true-crime masterpiece.