Quotes from Eve Babitz

At the time, I didn't think it was a tragedy, Zack's fall, but later I wondered if the tragedies in life are only about when you could have been great but weren't.

It's not that that kills people," he said, "it's the fear. I mean, it's okay to die. We remember that from our psychedelic days, don't we? That we are divine?

It made her question why human beings always appeared to be coming along so nicely as a whole when the bottom would fall out once again and they began collecting ears and filings from each other's heads.

One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about six women and the information that was exchanged, commonly called gossip, was enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the women and I looked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed, the man said, "What are all you girls doing out here? Come in and join the party." And the summit conference was over.

He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.

And so another season passed, and I hadn't seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there's nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

She was sure she wasn't ever going to go Hollywood, so she went.

You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.

It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't have fun in a high neckline - I don't care how witty you are.

ONE SUMMER MORNING while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn't want to go to New Jersey.

The only time men fall in love with roses is on douche commercials.

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.

It's difficult to be truly serious when you're in a city that can't even put up a skyscraper for fear the earth will start up one day and bring the whole thing down around everyone's ears.

Attitude' was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.

The thing about prisons of your own devise is that most of them are designed for traveling and can be taken anywhere, even from small towns in Michigan where you were ugly, all the way to glamorous rock shows where you have to have a pass to get backstage.

There is no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.

She knew exactly, sort of, what she was going to do.

I wouldn't leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean,' Mary declared. And indeed, she only left Los Angeles on urgent business. She was too tough and too fragile for anyplace else.

And he left. What discipline. I guess that is what they mean by "character" on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.

She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring.

With great effort, she dragged her attention away from the book

You know you're doing the right thing if you don't have to tap-dance.

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.