Eve Babitz > Quotes

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“. . I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans

“I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.”
― Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood

“You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions. I have found that what usually brings this lethargy on is if the woman displays some special kindness. Like making dinner.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“...chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“People go through life eating lamb chops and breaking their mother’s hearts.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she's bound to always be involved in parties and crowds.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version fo the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you "everything" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions.”
― Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood

“And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they’re you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought about Walter.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“The act of waitressing is a solace, it's got everything you could ask for - confusion, panic, humility, and food.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“But love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won't go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans

“From now on, I thought, only French mice will love me.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“This sense of 'place' -- that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“But then, as I read somewhere recently, narcissists always hurt the one they love the most.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare--he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die--when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible until there’s such incontrovertible evidence”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage