Quotes from Eve Babitz

She spent a lot of time in front of mirrors putting on brown eyeliner

But Jacaranda had always been lucky.

Renzo was the same kind of vegetarian as me, which meant he set out each morning to eat only raw foods and, as the day progressed, grew more and more corrupt—never degenerating into anything truly fatal like French fries or actual meat, but still . . .

The trouble with any salvation usually is that it's not at all funny.

A woman who was about Jacaranda's age approached them. She was what Jacaranda thought of as "one of those Vassar graduates who can spell from birth.

Those women, her age and a little older, who'd all gone crazy or who were hooking in the Polo Lounge or who were married to real old movie stars and had to look old too, to match. Those occasional men of genius who, like one friend of hers, could cast the right person for the right part and never miss—never.

you don't love things just because they're beautifully designed; you appreciate them and go home.

Sunrise went straight off to take a shower. Jacaranda left and returned from across the street, where she'd picked up two half-gallons of Iglenook Chablis, and poured herself a glass of cold wine. She looked out the window and tried to remember.

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd grown up.

Two days before she went to New York, Jacaranda stopped drinking.

Jacaranda believed that in the world of airplanes there were only two kinds of luggage—carry-on or lost.

Never mind the people who wrote huge articles in the New Journalism style about politics or rock stars. But for me to get into this magazine on the strength of no facts, no plodding, no interviews, and just a romance about Hollywood High, meant I must, in the magazine's opinion, be a star myself.

For one thing, she didn't like to be reminded of Max's scientific, detached sparkle. It

Women fell in love with Mary. They thought of her as unattainably beautiful and adopted as many of her mannerisms as they could. It didn't matter to them that she lacked that element, raw and beckoning, that trailed like a vapor after Gabrielle. There was an exotic, ladylike essence in Mary that stunned women who understood just what utter waxlike, blossom perfection she was.

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 as my old friend Irene Kamp used to quote some French guy who said, 'Everything will work out, but badly.

well come with me." "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.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.

I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.

The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.

I'm always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there's some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.

I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.

It's only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

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.