I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like.... It's like Tiffany's.... Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty...

This line is spoken by Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella *Breakfast at Tiffany’s* (1958), during her attempt to explain her restlessness and aversion to being “owned” by people or possessions. Holly is a young woman living in New York City on the margins of respectability, cultivating glamour while remaining emotionally unmoored. She describes Tiffany & Co. as a place that calms her—an emblem of order, safety, and refined permanence amid her precarious life. The remark about diamonds and age underscores her self-conscious performance of sophistication and her desire to control how she is seen.

Holly equates “Tiffany’s” with an ideal of stability: a world where beauty, value, and belonging seem fixed rather than improvised. Her refusal to own things “until” she finds where she and “things belong together” signals a deeper fear of commitment and of being defined by attachments—objects, places, or people. Tiffany’s becomes a metaphor for a home she cannot yet name: not materialism for its own sake, but the longing for a life that feels legitimate and safe. The aside about diamonds (“tacky…before you’re forty”) reveals her ironic, performative taste—using rules of elegance to mask vulnerability.