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Holly Golightly’s obsession with Tiffany’s jewelry store is a manifestation of her desire to secure a sense of belonging and happiness in her life. Whenever she’s particularly down, she tells the narrator, she goes to Tiffany’s. She does this because simply being in the store soothes her. The beauty of the jewelry, the smell of the shop, the attitude of the employees—everything about it makes Holly feel as if nothing bad is going to happen to her. If she could find a way to feel like this in “real life,” she says, she would finally settle down and invest herself in her current circumstances. For this reason, Tiffany’s becomes a representation of everything in life that Holly wants, ultimately signifying the vast difference between her actual reality and the kind of existence she wishes she could have.
Tiffany’s Quotes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The Breakfast at Tiffany’s quotes below all refer to the symbol of Tiffany’s. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Quotes
“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’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and someday I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
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“Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”
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Tiffany’s Symbol Timeline in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The timeline below shows where the symbol Tiffany’s appears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
...how to be herself whenever she’s rich enough to wake up and “have breakfast at Tiffany’s.” As Holly says this, she holds her nameless cat, explaining that she found him walking...
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...a sense of belonging. She then talks about how wonderful she feels whenever she’s at Tiffany’s, though she doesn’t particularly care about diamonds. Still, when she gets what she calls “the...
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...medallion. He knows it isn’t all that special, but, at the very least, it’s from Tiffany’s.
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...that she disliked Brazil. She’s now in Buenos Aires, which she loves. It’s not quite Tiffany’s, she says, but it’s close. She is involved with a wealthy lover who has a...
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