Slow Days, Fast Company 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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“. . 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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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?”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“...chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The act of waitressing is a solace, it's got everything you could ask for - confusion, panic, humility, and food.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“This sense of 'place' -- that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“She was America-for-spacious-skies, the reason our boys died gladly in the war.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Being places alone makes you think. Being there with someone makes you hounded by details, like what time the other person wants to leave; details that drain energy when you are trying to discover the core of an event. Being there with William put a damper on glorious possibilities. But I’d given up on those, which was why, I suppose, I went so many places with William.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The only time men fall in love with roses is on douche commercials.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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 hairstyles. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

“All art fades but sex fades fastest.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“There is no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.