Black Swans QUOTES

2 " It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

4 " In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

6 " I discovered there was something else I had never considered-Plan C- don't turn to mush, don't leave, stay and resist. Tango's entire point. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

8 " Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible until there’s such incontrovertible evidence "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

10 " That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

12 " And so another season passed, and I hadn’t seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there’s nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

14 " We drove back through the valley, down to Ventura Boulevard, and over the hills to Hollywood and then west to the Château Marmont, waiting like Tangiers for strangers to find happiness. The land of self-enchantment had, once more, upheld its end of the deal—to be there for those willing to stay. By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

16 " It’s not that that kills people,” he said, “it’s the fear. I mean, it’s okay to die. We remember that from our psychedelic days, don’t we? That we are divine? "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

18 " And he left. What discipline. I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans

20 " Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance. "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans