I Used to Be Charming Quotes

“As far as I'm concerned, you can't have fun in a high neckline - I don't care how witty you are.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p’s and q’s and keeping up with current oddities—no slouch more or less—and I see them shrink from my gaze as though I were a tramp.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“I wanted to go home. At home there were books, and I could sit outside under the tree on our savage crabgrass and read, and pet my cats, Liliocalani and Nefertiti, and yearn for European capitals.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“The feeling of glamour just wasn’t in the air.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“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?”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“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.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“I'm dying and use words like gaunt. When I weigh 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“Having spent the day defending myself from the slings and arrows of outrageous truck drivers and busboys, I am sometimes ill-equipped to suddenly assume an air of sensitive melancholy”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“When I weigh 130, my friends think I'm dying and use words like gaunt. When I weight 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“In Los Angeles, the supermarkets all have kosher sections, health food sections, Mexican and Thai shelves. These packages of foreign hungers mirror the city with their bilingual instructions.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“And when it’s unavoidable, for business reasons, that the northern sister make a trip to the grisly south, she holds her breath until she once more flies over the narrow escape of water that is the San Francisco Airport.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“It wasn’t that I actually was fat or anything, it was just that I wasn’t supposed to be eating all that candy—it showed. It showed at the beach. It showed in “tight” skirts. It showed in gym. But I was never dumb enough to think I was Fat; because I wasn’t, I just wasn’t perfect. And I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz