Lili Anolik > Quotes

“Wouldn't take no. You know how she is."
I wanted to shake my head, say, How? But instead I lied, nodded. That familiar feeling of disconnectedness, the sense that people were mysterious to me in a way they weren't to each other, descended. Before it could turn into full-on depression, I shook it off.”
― Lili Anolik, Dark Rooms

“Ophelia said, Isn't there even one for you?They're all adjectives, they make me feel modified (Eve Babitz)”
― Lili Anolik, Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

“I haven't even stepped all the way inside the front door when the smell hits me: a kind of stale fustiness, a combination of dust and old furniture, of meals cooked and eaten, of frayed carpeting. If sadness has a scent, this is it.”
― Lili Anolik, Dark Rooms

“I’m not serious, but I’m good so what difference does it make?”
― Lili Anolik, Didion and Babitz

“The photo was thus a fulfillment of her paradoxical desire: to reveal herself to the world so a single person would see.”
― Lili Anolik, Didion and Babitz

“These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting—like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.”
― Lili Anolik, Didion and Babitz

“I USED TO BE A PIECE OF ASS, NOW I’M AN ARTIST”
― Lili Anolik, Didion and Babitz

“Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" stated that, "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." And Nica was not just dead, she was murdered. Raped, too. Her story thus offered up the most potent narrative combination known to man.”
― Lili Anolik, Dark Rooms

“their dynamic is untrappable, unnameable, and unofficial. It was simultaneously more than a friendship and less; was as profound and rare as true love, as profound and rare as true hate.”
― Lili Anolik, Didion & Babitz