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

by Eve Babitz

Besides its being bad luck to even whisper that you’re happy, it’s also not nice basically.

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.”

You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost.

Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion. I love L.A. because it does things like that.

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.

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

L.A. was embarrassing; I tried not to notice.

Men and women are stuck with each other. Men go to parties they don’t really like because women want to go, and women in love go to baseball games and are graceful about it, though they never would have thought it up all by themselves.

It’s very relaxing being stuck.

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

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’s at least a precedent). There’s no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and learning that it’s not the answer.

And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.

You can’t tear down places like the Garden of Allah and just expect them to cease. All that Hollywoodness has to go somewhere. And in the end it took refuge in the Chateau.

Women want to be loved like roses.

They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.