76 Quotes by Eve Babitz

The word “escape” had blown out the glow: it was so boring of these American women to imagine they were worth pursuing.

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.

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

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.

Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version – even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.

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.

But you know so many men,” Ophelia said, “isn’t there even one for you?” “They’re all adjectives,” I said, “they all make me feel modified; even a word like girl friend gives me this feeling I’ve been cut in half. I’d rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.

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?

Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn’t arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he’s the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he’s the hero. It’s cornography. Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It’s a twentieth-century malaise.