Quotes from Eve Babitz

Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it.

You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost

he hit Sunrise Honey right across the face. She swerved the car into the bushes, jumped out, opened his door, yanked him upright, and then kicked in three of his ribs.

Every article about her sooner or later gets around to the subject of her lovers, who were reportedly legion. (Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stone Records: "In every young man's life there is an Eve Babitz. It's usually Eve Babitz.")

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

He had always been such a peerless creature. Shelby had the manners of a prince (an imaginary one, not a real one; real ones had no manners), the bearing of a noble spirit. She could tell him everything and he never got bored if she didn't stay clever. No lights went out in his eyes. And he could tell her anything: boring things about what he'd been doing—only she didn't get bored, she just liked the sound of his voice.

Which is another example of jealousy not panning out as expected; for in this story, actual humanity triumphed over rage an hatred, something we hardly imagine in our wildest hopes.

The second morning he took me to Carol's and it was love at first sight to this very day, only she's up in San Francisco with children and I can't stand children. Carol was perfect. She looked exactly like me, only she was black. She was from the Bronx and was a proof-reader and she'd once been one of Walter's girl friends when he tended bar at Stanley's, a Lower East Side Bar. Carol and I took acid every chance we got.

there was no point in owning anything in L.A. . . . in this she had a curious premonition or grasp of 'place.

And when Jacaranda would drop by his studio unannounced and Shelby would open the door for her, his eyes would clear from the cloudiness they'd fallen into while thinking of his work; his eyes would see her, and his face would light up, he'd smile, and he would cry: "You're here!

Which is only a darker version of 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.

If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which one would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

when he smiled, of course, he looked so young . . . No wonder she was getting this under-the-eyelashes treatment, she decided; the bastard was probably a Scorpio, trying to take her prisoner. She gave him the rest of her coffee.

My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboten and I've never found anything to disprove this.

I'm really not so crazy. I mean, I try not to do things that make me really miserable.

That is The Answer, I thought to myself, that dumb moosh is why all those people are banging their heads against the walls. Well, I thought, I suppose they deserve it.

One of the things I'd always dreaded about relationships was that you could say something—one thing—and it would wreck everything forever. You'd never be forgiven, not in ten thousand years.

howling on the tile bathroom floor. Sunrise bleeding in her white dress waited just behind Jacaranda's next drink. Her next drink would always be waiting for her, languishing away.

I had a horrible suspicion that I'd wind up in the same heartbreak hotel as I did with men. 'No you won't,' he reasoned. 'You be the man and that way you get to be the shit.

And he treated me with a chivalrous masculine know-how that I sopped up like a person who'd never heard of how chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.

And when it's unavoidable, for business reasons, that the northern sister make a trip to the grisly south, she holds her breath until she once more flies over the narrow escape of water that is the San Francisco Airport.

Don't spend any time at all," she said, "with people who don't love you. If you find yourself being attracted across a crowded room, leave.

Brian who made every outing something incredible, like the Sicilian picnics in The Leopard, where servants, silverware, kids, grandparents, coaches, ice, chickens, the whole nine Victorian yards, went on the picnic too.

He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.