Carolyn Bessette Kennedy Quotes

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I’ve only slipped away into the next room… Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere, very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt. Nothing is lost. One brief moment, and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again.

I have my own uniform: for my shirt, I have five of the same; for my trousers, I have ten of the same. Each time I design the perfect piece and I choose to wear only that, perhaps that is what sustainability is, you know?

What I am saying is that it’s important to consider who, what, how, where, when, and why you’re buying an item. You should love what you buy and not dispose of it soon after. I also like the idea of owning something that is beautiful, timeless, and lasts forever.

The backlash against feminism in the 1990's is the historical and cultural context in which I now perceive Carolyn's story. Women who spoke up about workplace inequality or domestic abuse were dismissed as histronic troublemakers. The new twenty-four-hour tabloid media - which skewered Anita Hill, reduced Marcia Clark to a "lawyerette," and blamed Monica Lewinsky for her affair with President Clinton - leveled unprecedented vitriol at Carolyn. It was all too easy to cast this unknown figure, who had no public profile until she met John, as a wild banshee, a vapid fashionista, or an undeserving harpy.

Another element of his design philosophy is one he adopted from the ancient Japanese theory wabi-sabi, which is an “acceptance of the world as an intransient entity,” or in layman’s terms, it’s finding beauty in all that is imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent within nature. From wabi comes wa: the goal of total unity or harmony which is the ideal realization of the maxim “less is more,” humble by choice, not materialistic and peaceful. All our lives—as was Carolyn’s—should aim to be wabi-sabi, an acceptance of our imperfections which ultimately leads to perfection. Mr. Yamamoto compares the thought to reading a book—if you are a good interpreter, you can read between the spaces and lines, understanding more than the words themselves.

Chanel’s color choice—black, which historically had been worn by ladies in mourning—was now a canny and provocative reminder to men of their maids or shopgirls who provided other services outside of their vocational bounds. Imagine, the gentleman in his home, his lady of the house and maid wearing similar dresses? Social equanimity, economic whitewashing, and warped seduction combined in one dress.

Jackie Kennedy once said, 'Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage, and death.

In a sense, Carolyn's experience was a larger-than-life version of many of the impossible standards that women face. You must be chaste, but you cannot be frigid or prudish. You must be beautiful, but you cannot care about being such. You must never be angry, even if people (or in Carolyn's case, the tabloids) spread lies about you.

John would say to his friends what he felt in the moment, in keeping with his need for forward motion. One minute, he may have felt like his marriage was done; the next, he didn't and still wanted his wife to come to Rory's wedding that very weekend. Some information, given on background after their death to several authors, seemingly manipulated a lot of that narrative toward the negative.

There is a long history of male journalists fetishizing their female subjects, and Carolyn was described by her physical attributes again and again. Assumptions were made based on whether she smiled or frowned and narratives were spun, and none put her in a positive light.

When reexamining her short life from a distance of twenty years, I found lessons about a dysfunctional culture and how woman struggle to build a life within a patriarchal society. The The nineties' media morphed into a newly minted sensation factory in which the burden of leading a public existence went from tolerable to excruciating for both Carolyn and John. While one part of the culture was basking in a champagne supernova of pared-down chic, another British music invasion, and languid cool, the tabloids began a feeding frenzy that forgot the objects of their fascination were human beings.

I hope that witnessing her story will become a small part of the movement, already growing as the next generations come into power, in which we demand more personal responsibility and ethical consciousness than was required in the environment in which we were raised. Maybe even an evolution of the human spirit, where we not only recognize and empathize with on another but, to quote Robert F. Kennedy, we 'make gentle the life of this world.

When she appears in the volumes of Kennedy literature, it is often as a sidebar without empathy, compassion, or desire to understand who she really was. It's time she got her due.

The chance of inflicting a sensible injury upon another person always struck her as the worst thing that could happen to her. She was stoutly determined not to be hollow. Her way of taking compliments was to get rid of them as rapidly as possible. - From Carole Radziwell's eulogy of Carolyn

Vanessa Friedman, the fashion director and chief fashion critic for the New York Times, proposed a different theory to explain Carolyn's fashion resurgence, explaining in an October 2023 column that Carolyn 'offered an example of a different way to be in the world, one that valorized what wasn't shown. And because she never gave a single interview after her marriage, what she wore became a stand-in for who she was.

Stories are our history. Yet many of the current incarnations of stories, news, and media seem to have taken an evolutional leap backward, and we use them as if we are, again, cave people relaying how best to entrap our prey. Rather than being about killing (outright, anyway), it has become about shame and ridicule, or, rather, technology has given the shame and ridicule that have always been present a velocity and reach they never had before.