Edie Sedgwick Quotes

Andy Warhol would like to have been Edie Sedgwick. He would like to have been a charming, well-born débutante from Boston. He would like to have been anybody except Andy Warhol.

I'd like to turn on the whole world for just a moment... just for a moment. I'm greedy; I'd like to keep most of it for myself and a few others, a few of my friends... to keep that superlative high, just on the cusp of each day... so that I'd radiate sunshine.

I’m in love with everyone I’ve ever met in one way or another. I’m just a crazy, unhinged disaster of a human being.

It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way.

Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) I don't know how she did it. Fire She was shaking all over. It took her hours to put her make-up on. But she did it. Even the false eye-lashes. She ordered gin with triple limes. Then a limosine. Everyone knew she was the real heroine of Blonde on Blonde. oh it isn't fair oh it isn't fair how her ermine hair turned men around she was white on white so blonde on blonde and her long long legs how I used to beg to dance with her but I never had a chance with her oh it isn't fair how her ermine hair used to swing so nice used to cut the air how all the men used to dance with her I never got a chance with her though I really asked her down deep where you do really dream in the mind reading love I'd get inside her move and we'd turn around and she'd turn around and turn the head of everyone in town her shaking shaking glittering bones second blonde child after brian jones oh it isn't fair how I dreamed of her and she slept and she slept forever and I'll never dance with her no never she broke down like a baby like a baby girl like a lady with ermine hair oh it isn't fair and I'd like to see her rise again her white white bones with baby brian jones baby brian jones like blushing baby dolls

I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it's worth being a public fool if that's all you can be in order to communicate yourself.

There’s no doubt that at times Edie Sedgwick howled at the moon, but she knew her own power and she dignified the unvarnished truth of her existence. Her life was loose, baggy and sloppy, but completely uncaged, and you can’t ask more than that.

She was abused and tormented, and despite all the drug abuse seemed to float through a world where she did not belong. Whatever went on behind those beautiful eyes, you cannot help feeling that only the fairies and leprechauns will recognise Edie Sedgwick

Edie Sedgwick didn’t really fit in on this planet. She didn’t fit in anywhere. She’d spent years in mental institutions, she took far too many drugs and yet she was destined to make an impression on just about everyone who ever met her, so much so that they wanted to write about her, sing about her, put her photos on album covers and, of course, film her.

I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it’s worth being a public fool if that’s all you can be in order to communicate yourself.

She didn’t belong on this planet, yet she somehow touched everyone who came into contact with her

On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.

If all I cared about was me, I could make a million. And that’s what they will never understand.

I had fun, but I really didn't have anyone I particularly loved. And I still don't, except for loving friends. But I mean I haven't been in love with anyone for years and years... but I have a certain amount of faith that it will come.

In the center is Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the first of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks and a great-great-great-grandfather of Edie's and of mine, is buried under his tombstone, a high rising obelisk, and his wife Pamela is beside him. They are like the king and queen on a chessboard, and all around them like a pie are more modest stones, put in layers, back and round in a circle. The descendants of Judge Sedgwick, from generation unto generation, are all buried with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in toward their ancestor. The legend is that on Judgement Day when they arise and face the Judge, they will have to see no one but Sedgwicks.

Everything that happened to me has been a paradox for life. The very things that I should have done would have been the trap… I believed in something else. You have to work like mad to make people understand… Even if I don’t make it, you know, I really insist on believing, and then I fall off the edge because there’s nobody else to follow it.

Judge Sedgwick’s daughter, Catharine. She was a spinster and a novelist in the early 1800s and the author of A New England Tale

I say death a lot… it means I’m concerned with life.

I just believe that you live alone, creating your life as you go.

Have you ever noticed a certain type of man who always wants to go along with his wife to pick out her clothes? I've always thought that's because he wants to wear them himself. Truman Capote on Warhol

Edie enters the Factory in her otherworldly daze. She is at once natural and a creation of pure artifice. Everything about her - her tights, her long legs, her high heels, her preternaturally skinny body, her huge eyes - seems to drift upwards as if the cigarette she is smoking were made of helium.

I do love Alice in Wonderland though. That’s something I think I could do very well. Don’t you think we ought to do an A.W.? A.W.’s Alice in Wonderland? Andy Warhol’s Alice in Wonderland? A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand. It would make a fantastic film, so I wanted somebody to write the script for it in a modern sense. I think it would be the most marvelous movie in the world if it could be done, don’t you think? Really, I don’t think they’ve done one since they did a Walt Disney one - which isn’t really doing it. In a sense it is, but not in the way it really should be done. What’s needed right now is a real scene. I mean not just cartoon characters, but the actual character of people because there’s so many fantastic people that you might as well use the people.

I think it's pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices - we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promises of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever. And wasn't that the ultimate feminine achievement - to be too gorgeous, too fucked up, too talented and sad and vulnerable to survive, like some kind of freak orchid with a two-minute lifespan? Who else could we look up to? Being young doesn't seem like enough of an excuse - we egged each other on, committed, together, to these poisonous theories, until we reached a point where disagreement would have meant a betrayal of our friendship. How could we have been so wrong and so stupid?