Rona Jaffe > Quotes

“But fathers always thought their youngest daughters were rather special”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Anyone has a right to make a fool of herself if she’s really in love,” Caroline said. “There aren’t any laws. But you have to realize everyone else does it too, and forgive yourself. That is a law.”

“Whose law?”

“Caroline’s law,” Caroline said.

“Do you really believe that?” April asked softly.

“I have to. I try to, that is.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“It was funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more - almost sacred - could turn into nothing at all”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“I think I cry because I feel free.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Cherry in the Martini

“And so they played the game again, for one last time. It did not matter that there were no maps or dice, no rule books, or even that there were no monsters. All of the evil that had ever existed was real again in Robbie’s mind, and so when Daniel said there were Gorvils to enchant or kill, Pardieu saw them. The others did not see them. They saw nothing but the death of a hope and the loss of their friend.”
― Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters

“Weddings are fun. After all, it's only once in a lifetime. Then you have the housework and the babies and the work begins. A girl has to have something to remember.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“We are the behemoths—lost, lumbering, out of our time. We are about to become extinct. And yet we are young, barely thirty, and we have not even begun to live.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Cherry in the Martini

“Let's have a strange affair, a private love affair all our own. A vicarious mental affair.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“People don't always run away from something bad. Sometimes people have to run away from perfection.”
― Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters

“You ask me if I love you and what you really mean is will I devour you, envelope you, obliterate life for you and worse, will I allow you to do that to me. That's why I never answer you, because I do love you, but not in the way you want, and I never will.”
― Rona Jaffe

“drive any secure man away. Maybe Brooke”
― Rona Jaffe, An American Love Story

“She was still a romantic. The world was askew, but she would always have dreams. She would have her own life now, on her own terms, and she would make it work.”
― Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters

“After that her lack of libido didn't bother Julia at all. As long as it didn't make her breasts sag, it didn't matter.”
― Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters

“What good was a love affair that ended with the last train to the country, and Christmas presents that had to be given the day before Christmas because holidays were family times, and knowing that you would still be as alone as before because you could never telephone the man you loved when you needed him?”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Men no longer looked at them. Heads did not turn; there were no anticipatory smiles when they appeared. They had given up on the security of knowing that men thought they were forces to be reckoned with, if only on the level of lust. Now they had become real forces. They were, for better or worse, real people.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Room-Mating Season

“When pressured, my mother told me that God just hadn’t sent her any more children, but most of the time she liked to say that I was so perfect she knew she could never have another one like me, so she had stopped. Whenever she told me I was perfect, I wondered what was so terrible about me that she would have to lie this way to cover up.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Cherry in the Martini

“You didn't tell the world your friend was crazy. That would be the ultimate betrayal.”
― Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters

“It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in witch they it right back to the weaker one and never think of escaping from the whole filthy mess.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“But she knew that, despite their best intentions, people reached a point beyond which they could not return but could only hope for a safe landing.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“...they had reached a plateau on which she suffered and he seemed quite content.”
― Rona Jaffe

“To tell the truth she was quite thrilled to be working at the very source of a magazine which helped build up much of her present misinformation.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Mary Agnes had been saving her money for two years…and perhaps her parents had been saving up for her wedding for the past twenty. And it was over in five hours, with nothing left but an album of photographs and a reel or two of movie film and a dress that would have to be kept in a box with moth balls, and a million confused and blurred memories.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously .
'An old American institution of mismating.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“But why is it that when you win you must also lose?”
― Rona Jaffe