kate lagatta

“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 must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, 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.

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle