Edie Sedgwick Quotes

1. The whole place turned into a gigantic orgy, every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs, especially the needle and mainlining scene, losing syringes down the pool drains and blocking up the water infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night...Drinking, guzzling tequila, vodka, and scotch, and bourbon, and shooting up every other half-second, and just going into an incredible sexual tailspin. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Just couldn't get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I've ever been in or ever hope to be in, and I should be ashamed of myself. I'm not, but I should be. (describing the orgy scene in Ciao! Manhattan)

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

3. You live alone, creating your life as you go.

4. I think something very weird's going on now, 'cause the power that is permitted to youth is quite extraordinary. And they are sort of run by that kind of power.

5. It's sort of like a mockery in a way of reality because they think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers when there is something bitter to taste. And to pretend there isn't is foolish. (on 1960's Flower Children)

6. He nearly incommunicable torments of speed, buzzerama, that acrylic high, horrorous, yodelling, repetitious echoes of an infinity so brutally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare.

7. Something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, and I said, out loud: "I wish I was dead." And the reason I said it was the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience was really an alien experience in a way, because I didn't even know him. It was a one-night jag. He was married and had children, and I just felt really, like, lost. It just wasn't worth living anymore because I was all alone again. (Describing the aftermath of a drug-fueled sexual encounter)

8. It was really sad - Bobby (Neuwirth)'s and my affair. The only true, passionate, and lasting love scene, and I practically ended up in the psychopathic ward. I had really learned about sex from him, making love, loving, giving. It just completely blew my mind - it drove me insane. I was like a sex slave to this man. I could make love for forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, without getting tired. But the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills.

9. Isn't that sad! I'm so fragile. It's tragic laughs. Can you believe it? That's so sad. (response to watching herself on a monitor).

10. 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.

11. You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way...you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.

12. While I was girl of the year and superstar and all that crap, everything I did was really...motivated by psychological disturbance. But Id, Id make a mask out of my face because I didn't realize I was quite beautiful...I had to wear heavy black eyelashes like bat wings and dark lines under my eyes. Cut all my hair off, my long dark hair, cut it off and strip it silver and blond. All these little manoeuvres I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me. Id freak out in a very physical way, and...it was all taken in a fashion trend.

13. When I was with Andy Warhol I was dancing jazz ballet twice a day so i just wore my leotards and I knew I wasn't going to turn anybody on so I just trotted around in my leotards. When I went out on the street Id put on a coat. But Vogue photographed me in leotards and a t-shirt as a new costume.

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

15. In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem...Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

16. It's like my having to walk down thousands and thousands of white marble stairs...and nothing but a very very blue sky, very blue...and I'd have to walk down them forever. I never thought about going up...Don't you think that must mean something? (describing a dream to Chuck Wein)

17. I'm a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many people's, young people's lives. (on Andy Warhol)

18. The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot.

19. I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

20. Why do people stop developing?...from being children to maybe stopping at a very adolescent age, and they stay there until they die. Physically die. I mean, they react adolescently. They don't change. They don't develop. They don'tit's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.




21. Fashion as a whole is a farce, completely. The people behind it are perverted, the styles are created by freaked out people, just natural weirdos. I know this because I worked with all those people while I was modeling.

22. The colors...oh, I see the most fantastic things. Do you realize when people just close their eyes what they see? It's unbelievable. Colors and things, forms of every sort. I wonder if that happens for everybody?

23. Speed is the ultimate, all time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection. There’s no way to explain it unless you’ve been through it. There’s no way to tell anyone who hasn’t tasted it. I’d like to turn the whole world on just for 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. Keep that superlative high just on the cusp of each day so that I radiate sunshine.

24. I have an accident about every two years, and one day it won't be an accident.

25. It's okay - I know. (on being told by a palm reader that she had a very short life line).

26. I moved out to Santa Barbara to straighten out, supposedly, and I started using drugs, which I found were plentiful in Isla Vista, around the college campus - UCSB. And then I started rollicking around with all kinds of kids a lot younger than me. Anywhere from 15 to their 20s, but I was kind of in my late 20s. And, uh...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 in years and years. But I have a certain amount of faith that it'll come. (On coming home to California in the late 1960's).

27. Everything that happened to me has been a paradox for life. The very things that I should have done would have been the trap. The very things I might have given into, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I found hardest to end. 'Cause 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. And I would just fall off the edge.

28. I came to New York to see what I could see - that's from a children's book, isn't it? - and to find the living part.

29. I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

30. I had no money. My parents closed down all credit. I couldn't get any money, and they were trying to lock me up again because I'd taken some acid and told my psychiatrist about it. I just told him what the experience was like and he jumped, and at the same time he read about Andy Warhol's "pornographic" movies in Time. I was in the studio a lot, so my psychiatrist got really upset and called my parents and was gonna have me put away, so I ran away to Europe with Andy and Chuck.  (on being financially cut off from her parents in 1965)

31. I heard about this doctor who gave vitamin shots, and they were very stimulating and kept you going for quite a while. I was under treatment with vitamin therapy, just multivitamin shots. But I heard about this super deal that this other doctor had. A guy I was going out with at the time told me not to go to him, never to have his shots. So I immediately took them, thinking there must be something special about them...And there was. And I went, and that was the beginning of injecting drugs. I went to a doctor for it. I didn't handle it myself until a year later. I turned into a total speed freak for a few months. That's about as long as I could survive, and then I placed myself in the hospital.

32. They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.

33. I act this way because that's the way I feel like acting. If people like it, fine. If they don't, that's their problem.

34. It's not going to interfere with the film. I heal miraculously. I've been in an auto accident and another fire. They thought I'd need plastic surgery, but I haven't a scar...No, I don't think I'm accident prone, but it's strange. (referring to a house fire).





35. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We all did the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. (describing Manhattan State psychiatric hospital).
 

36. When I started going around with Andy people thought I had a press agent. I didn't. After a while I got sort of paranoid about all the publicity, and I holed up in my apartment and cut off the telephone for two months. I saw only two people. Then I felt ready to go out again. I want to do more acting. I like it, but it's hard - the long hours, getting the lines straight, I didn't have to do that with Andy.

37. I say the word death a lot ... think of it as ... primal relations, opposite, so if I say death a lot, it means I'm concerned with life. It's true.

38. I'm out of my mind! Somebody told me that a long time ago. Some idiot! (laughs) … In a dream. I don't want to think about dreams now.

39. When I was in the hospital, I was very suicidal in a kind of blind way, I was starving to death and just 'cause I didn't want to turn out like my family showed me, you know, that's all I ever saw of people, was my own family. I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone. Oh, God. So I didn't want to live.



40. I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me … from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching … a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.

41. I'd been two years locked up in hospitals. I was twenty when I got out from Bloomingdale and I met a young man from Harvard who was very attractive in a sort of Ivy league way. And we made love in my grandmother's apartment and it was terrific, it was just fabulous. That was the first time I ever made love and I had no inhibitions or anything. It was just beautiful. I didn't get my period and so I had to tell my doctor. The hospital pass was given to see if you could handle yourself outside, so I was terrified to tell him that I thought I was pregnant, but I finally did. I was pregnant … I could get an abortion without any hassle at all, just on the grounds of a psychiatric case. So that wasn't too good a first experience with lovemaking. I mean, it kind of screwed up my head, for one thing. This fellow found out. I was upset … and he asked me, and I said: "I'm pregnant. I'm not going to ask you for anything, so don't get uptight, but it's just kind of making me uncomfortable. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do about it." He split, and I didn't see him again until the summer had passed and I went to Cambridge for my first free year.   (on becoming pregnant after her first sexual experience).

42. I was just livid, out of hand. I got madder and madder as we drove along, and just as we drove by the Chelsea Hotel I did something. I've never done anything to hurt anyone, and yet I was so furious that I pressed the button and rolled down the window screen - the glass plate between the front and back seats - and I told the chauffeur that the man in the back was molesting me, he was a junkie! I was so horrified by what I said, so I flipped out by that, that I jumped out of the car into the path of oncoming traffic, certain that my head would be crushed. All that happened was that I got bruised, badly bruised, but no broken bones. I mean, I was conscious, not destroyed at all. But I'd done such a terrible thing! I couldn't reconcile that. I had been about to explode. The hotel people came out, and they and Bobby carried me in. I had to pretend I was unconscious because I couldn't comprehend the fact that I had tried to get him busted, to hurt him seriously. He was the only person I had ever gotten violent about. I take whatever violence comes into my system much more heavily on myself than on anyone else. But that was a pretty tight squeeze. I really craved making love to him. (describing a fight with her lover, Bob Neuwirth.)

43. But I really, since I exist, at all, I believe that it's possible for people...I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic...That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that there's to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe in it. And I refuse, like, since I'm still alive and done the things I've done and seen things and understood things as far as I have, and I am alive, I mean physically intact. When I shouldn't be, according to medical reports and so forth. I mean I should be, not here. That's all there is to it. So the magic's working and it's a rare situation.

44. I'm afraid of habit patterns...It would be too much of a routine if you had to establish definite ways of getting through things. You'd get very bored.

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