Quotes from Rona Jaffe

But fathers always thought their youngest daughters were rather special

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.

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.

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.

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

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

None of us is responsible for the wonderful people we don't meet; we're only lucky when we do meet them.

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.

We felt it was really a dangerous world where you got punished for doing nothing.

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.

I think I cry because I feel free.

But why is it that when you win you must also lose?

Girls always think, "I'm going to be the exception," Caroline thought; it's a weakness of the species, like a collie's tiny brain.

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.

The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm

What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously . 'An old American institution of mismating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

they had reached a plateau on which she suffered and he seemed quite content.

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.

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.