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
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