Quotes from Eve Babitz

chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.

So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.

You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.

People go through life eating lamb chops and breaking their mother's hearts.

I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions. I have found that what usually brings this lethargy on is if the woman displays some special kindness. Like making dinner.

It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.

The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It's freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it's freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It's freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.

From now on, I thought, only French mice will love me.

But then, as I read somewhere recently, narcissists always hurt the one they love the most.

This sense of 'place' -- that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.

Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.

But love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won't go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions.

I discovered there was something else I had never considered-Plan C- don't turn to mush, don't leave, stay and resist. Tango's entire point.

She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she's bound to always be involved in parties and crowds.

The act of waitressing is a solace, it's got everything you could ask for - confusion, panic, humility, and food.

For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.

She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.

And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they're you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought about Walter.

'Dirty Dancing' is one of my favorite movies, and I was in love with Patrick Swayze for years, but I tried to stay out of his way and never to meet him because I knew if I did, he'd want to talk about yogurt or some weird dietary restriction or something.

People with brains went to New York, and people with faces came West.

When I promise I'll do something, I do it. At least since I got sober.