Eve Babitz Quotes

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.

...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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Normal men aren’t going to love anyone who looks forward to anything but them. And I couldn’t help looking forward to being published.

She was America-for-spacious-skies, the reason our boys died gladly in the war.

It wasn’t the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.

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.

Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible until there’s such incontrovertible evidence

She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?

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.

They must have begun in life knowing they were going to amount to something.

She knew exactly, sort of, what she was going to do.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't have fun in a high neckline - I don't care how witty you are.

We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

God what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumbleweeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn't been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.

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.

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?

Attitude' was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.

You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.

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 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.

Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare--he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die--when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.

In those days, and still now, I had a lot of women friends -- mostly in the black swan category-- who ignored convention and things society expected women to be, but didn't fuck your boyfriend, no matter what. Fucking people's husbands is for people from Ivy League colleges who read too much John O'Hara.

In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.

We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.

He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.

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

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.

became clear to me that beauty has nothing to do with fashion, that love can conquer anything, sex is art, and let’s see . . . hope springs eternal. I love the rain.

It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained.

It made her question why human beings always appeared to be coming along so nicely as a whole when the bottom would fall out once again and they began collecting ears and filings from each other's heads.

That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

And he left. What discipline. I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.

ONE SUMMER MORNING while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn’t want to go to New Jersey.

There is no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.

The only time men fall in love with roses is on douche commercials.

With great effort, she dragged her attention away from the book,

All art fades but sex fades fastest.

The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.

It's difficult to be truly serious when you're in a city that can't even put up a skyscraper for fear the earth will start up one day and bring the whole thing down around everyone's ears.

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.

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.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version fo 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.

The thing about prisons of your own devise is that most of them are designed for traveling and can be taken anywhere, even from small towns in Michigan where you were ugly, all the way to glamorous rock shows where you have to have a pass to get backstage.

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.

You know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have to tap-dance.

She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring.

Well, who is he?' I asked, the first time I saw Mary with his glazed expression. 'Money,' Mary said.

New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.

How could they all just casually drink Coca-Cola when one sip, and it tasted like musty trunks? How on earth could anyone eat a hamburger unless they were starving?

it seemed much more likely to scald and burn from sex and rage instead.

But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent - and I guess some people never were.

It seemed to her that she’d been smoking in order to get through the days, not that her days were ornamented by cigarettes.

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.

The feeling of glamour just wasn’t in the air.

Ophelia said, Isn't there even one for you?They're all adjectives, they make me feel modified (Eve Babitz)

We drove back through the valley, down to Ventura Boulevard, and over the hills to Hollywood and then west to the Château Marmont, waiting like Tangiers for strangers to find happiness. The land of self-enchantment had, once more, upheld its end of the deal—to be there for those willing to stay. By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I.

writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.

It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.

And so another season passed, and I hadn’t seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there’s nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château’s charm, that it didn’t have any objections to one’s committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill,

God, what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumbleweeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn't been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.

After all, historically it’s always been dreadful for women, and the logic given them was “It’s going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it.” I

It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear. In

you don’t know what life is. One day you’re going to run into a brick wall.

Most addicts kill themselves by just trying to get some sleep.

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

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

She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn’t publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.

Hollywood, after all, is the home of those whom silent star Mae Murray called the “self-enchanted.” And having grown up in Hollywood, I’ve known a lot of self-enchanted people. Not since the pharaohs thought they were gods have so many human beings believed that they themselves (and not their publicists or destiny or some larger force) were responsible for the fact that so many other human beings worshiped them.

Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn’t exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar’s and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, “…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.

At least the Château Marmont kept looking as if when you entered a room you might be in Tangiers when you left. But then, my friends are the type who love Tangiers, and I’ve always been afraid if I went to the actual place, I’d never come back.

You are perfect for Los Angeles, you know. You’re like the lady whom everyone’s in love with but they hate themselves for it because you’re all wrong. They don’t have anything to go on with you. No precedents. You’re voluptuous and too smart and too kind and too mean, and you give everyone just what they want and then you get sad and bland . . . I used to wonder why you dressed the way you did—one minute I see you in those old shirts and that scarf! . . . and the next you’re at some art thing and I see women look at you when you don’t know it and they’re all wondering how in the hell you did it. You glow.

There are a lot of people who don’t grow limp with hatred when they’re kept waiting. I know a whole bunch of people who don’t consider the concept of fifteen minutes time at all. So if they say they’ll meet you at 11:00 and they show up at 11:25, they apologize (if they remember) for being ten minutes late—the other fifteen minutes never existed and there is some sort of common understanding among most people that those fifteen minutes are a grace period.

Sometimes, as the sun slants against the twilight a certain way, Scott looks like a pillar of strength. It cannot be easy to love me. Maybe if he were 'in love' with me, as Sam says he is, he couldn’t be trusted to tell me the truth, and I could not love him so. Which I do. I love him so. Yes, behold this blue pool/bluey-dressed ambivalence that I choose to call love, whose footsteps I hear coming up the path. Whatever scenes I imagine, whomever Scott goes to visit, it doesn’t matter, or at least not enough. Behold me, then, smiling. Waiting for my lover, just as I am.

going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach untilfinally there I’d be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.