Top 80 Eve Babitz Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “And he left. What discipline. I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.”

— Eve Babitz

52. “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

53. “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

54. “At the time, I didn’t think it was a tragedy, Zack’s fall, but later I wondered if the tragedies in life are only about when you could have been great but weren’t.”

— Eve Babitz

55. “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

56. “But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent – and I guess some people never were.”

— Eve Babitz

57. “Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates.”

— Eve Babitz

58. “Work and love – the two best things – flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear.”

— Eve Babitz

59. “That always seemed like the whole thing; they’ll let you have stories, but you can’t ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.”

— Eve Babitz

60. “But then, as I read somewhere recently, narcissists always hurt the one they love the most.”

— Eve Babitz

61. “But love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won’t go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.”

— Eve Babitz

62. “Once when I testified before a Senate Committee about LSD, Bobby Kennedy asked me how many people I knew smoked marijuana. Brazenly I announced, “Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.”

— Eve Babitz

63. “Oh, come on,” he said finally, a secret pleased look just beneath the surface of his face, “you love it here. Admit it.”

— Eve Babitz

64. “We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.”

— Eve Babitz

65. “You know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have to tap-dance.”

— Eve Babitz

66. “I’m glad I wasn’t seated next to Celia, because what is there to say to someone younger than you who marries for money, except “How do you like your money?”

— Eve Babitz

67. “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

68. “After all, 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.” I.”

— Eve Babitz

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Most addicts kill themselves by just trying to get some sleep.”

— Eve Babitz

72. “It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear. In.”

— Eve Babitz

73. “It seemed to her that she’d been smoking in order to get through the days, not that her days were ornamented by cigarettes.”

— Eve Babitz

74. “The thing about prisons of your own devise is that most of them are designed for traveling and can be taken anywhere, even from small towns in Michigan where you were ugly, all the way to glamorous rock shows where you have to have a pass to get backstage.”

— Eve Babitz

75. “New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.”

— Eve Babitz

76. “The only time men fall in love with roses is on douche commercials.”

— Eve Babitz

77. “The feeling of glamour just wasn’t in the air.”

— Eve Babitz

78. “I have a lot of friends who are positive life isn’t worth living without True Love Forever. They’re always on the prowl and sulk against the gods when they go to a party and don’t fall in love. Women, especially, engage themselves in ghastly self-inflicted tortures for which they’ve been primed since childhood. After all, 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.”

— Eve Babitz

79. “I’m really not so crazy. I mean, I try not to do things that make me really miserable.”

— Eve Babitz

80. “He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.”

— Eve Babitz

81. “I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm and my friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery and resourcefulness, and who never told you the same story twice. Now, women I didn’t mind. I mean, you can go places with a woman and come back just fine.”

— Eve Babitz

82. “The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.”

— Eve Babitz

83. “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.”

— Eve Babitz

84. “Attitude” was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.”

— Eve Babitz

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

— Eve Babitz

86. “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... are all my occasional romances to fall to the ground after a month or so, like the jacaranda flowers?”

— Eve Babitz

87. “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

88. “In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”

— Eve Babitz