Rona Jaffe Quotes

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.

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

The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm

You ask me if I love you and what you really mean is will I devour you, envelope you, obliterate life for you and worse, will I allow you to do that to me. That's why I never answer you, because I do love you, but not in the way you want, and I never will.

Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

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.

What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously .
'An old American institution of mismating.

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.

A blond in a red dress can do without introductions
but not without a bodyguard.

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?

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.