Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

“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,”

he was one of those creatures so young and almost mystically cheerful that he seemed doomed.

The Blackboard looked like it might twirl into heaven with just another double tequila.

Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

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.

I’d broken off with both of those guys because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

Damn girl

I’d never known what a tar-baby was until Shawn explained one afternoon in Laguna that a tar-baby is one of those people who drive you crazy through your life by never responding to anything you do no matter what kind of display you cook up for their delight. And the more you try to embrace your tar-baby, the more you get stuck in the tar and the worse everything is.

It must have been his basic mediocre brain that drew people to him; he was like an animal who’s too much of an animal to comprehend the inevitability of his own death, and that kind of person is always a comfort.