The Best of Everything Quotes

“But fathers always thought their youngest daughters were rather special”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Anyone has a right to make a fool of herself if she’s really in love,” Caroline said. “There aren’t any laws. But you have to realize everyone else does it too, and forgive yourself. That is a law.”

“Whose law?”

“Caroline’s law,” Caroline said.

“Do you really believe that?” April asked softly.

“I have to. I try to, that is.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“It was funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more - almost sacred - could turn into nothing at all”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Let's have a strange affair, a private love affair all our own. A vicarious mental affair.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Mary Agnes had been saving her money for two years…and perhaps her parents had been saving up for her wedding for the past twenty. And it was over in five hours, with nothing left but an album of photographs and a reel or two of movie film and a dress that would have to be kept in a box with moth balls, and a million confused and blurred memories.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“None of us is responsible for the wonderful people we don’t meet; we’re only lucky when we do meet them.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“Weddings are fun. After all, it's only once in a lifetime. Then you have the housework and the babies and the work begins. A girl has to have something to remember.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“What good was a love affair that ended with the last train to the country, and Christmas presents that had to be given the day before Christmas because holidays were family times, and knowing that you would still be as alone as before because you could never telephone the man you loved when you needed him?”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“But she knew that, despite their best intentions, people reached a point beyond which they could not return but could only hope for a safe landing.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in witch they it right back to the weaker one and never think of escaping from the whole filthy mess.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously .
'An old American institution of mismating.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“To tell the truth she was quite thrilled to be working at the very source of a magazine which helped build up much of her present misinformation.”
― Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything