76 Quotes by Eve Babitz

It was forever fascinating to me that men never noticed much about Mary other than, "Well, I mean, she's pretty and everything..." That high gloss, which floored women, went right over men's heads. It was as though they had no receivers for her particular wavelength.

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

It’s the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It’s all only frames from which the content rises.

I was always much too elated to imagine despair.

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.

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.

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

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

There are three basic personality factors in cats: The kind who run up when you say hello and rub against you in cheap romance; the kind who run away certain that you mean to ravish them; and the kind who just look back and don’t move a muscle. I love all three kinds.