Edie Sedgwick

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. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is.

Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick (April 20 1943 – November 16 1971) was an American actress, socialite, and heiress who starred in many of Andy Warhol's short films in the 1960s.

Sourced

I do love Alice in Wonderland though, that's something I think I could do very well.

A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand.

• 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, uh, 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'e 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.
  • Inner and Outer Space (1965), directed by Andy Warhol

Edie : American Girl (1982)

Quotes of Sedgwick from Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.

• It's okay — I know.
  • On being told by a palm reader that she had a very short life line.

• I made a mask out of my face because I didn't realize I was quite beautiful. God blessed me so. I practically destroyed it. I had to wear heavy black eyelashes like bat wings, and dark lines under my eyes, and cut all my hair off, my long dark hair. Cut it off and strip it silver and blonde. All those little manoeuvres I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me.

• 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.

• 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.

• The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot.
  • Referring to the Warhol crowd in New York

• You want to hear something I wrote about the horror of speed? Well, maybe you don't, but the 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. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is.

• 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.

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Quotes of Sedgewick from Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

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.

• 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.

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

• The very things I might have given in to, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I fought hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. And um, what makes that sane is that I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

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

• 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

• 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.

• I want a further step for me...that's my process of development. I don't want to cut it off. I understand where it's been cut off for other people, and I understand the whole process in that order of things, but I see no way in that isn't a trap, that will let me out again without damaging too much, you know?

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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, like...Yes, and I'd have to walk down them forever. I never thought about going up...I don't know, don't you think that must mean something? It never occurred to me to turn it around, I mean, why didn't I think that way? This was after I had the car accident.
  • Describing a dream to Chuck Wein.

• 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.
  • Referring to the 60's youth movements.

• 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. I mean the ones that wonder around and know, at the same time, and yet wear flowers, and they deserve to wear flowers. And they've earned their smile...you can tell by people's eyes.
  • On the 60's flower children.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. '

• 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.

• Why do people stop developing, or, like they stop the way you can rate their, psychologically, their development? Where they stop, and just 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't — it's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.

• 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

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

• 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 realise, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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

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

Quotes about Sedgwick

Alphabetized by author

She was a sweet simple girl. I don't know the other sides of Edie. I know the sweet, wide-eyed, enthusiastic Edie. ~ Betsey Johnson

Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs whoever gave them to her. ~ Nico

File:Dennis-hopper-andy-warhol-at-table-1963.jpg

She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody's private fantasies. ~ Andy Warhol

• I don't think Edie had ever given up on a regular, on at least the concept of having a regular, easygoing kind of life. Although it might have been a little out of her reach, she would emulate that …It was like she could see, just out of her reach, she could see how it could have been her, what she could offer, the fine quality of thought that she was capable of.
  • Jeff Briggs, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She thought it was funny that people thought they were important.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I didn't think this was going to happen to her, what happened to her. I thought she was a major soul.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I think she had a naivete. That's how she was able to dominate...because she had no self-judgement, except on this deep level.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She would do almost anything that came into her head.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I never had that much to do with Edie Sedgwick. I've seen where I have had, and read that I have had, but I don't remember Edie that well. I remember she was around, but I know other people who, as far as I know, might have been involved with Edie. Uh, she was a great girl. An exciting girl, very enthusiastic...But I don't recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I'd remember.
  • Bob Dylan, famously rumoured to have been Edie's lover, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie on one level was an unparalleled exhibitionist, but on another level she was very shy. I think the thing about Edie, her antic quality had a lot to do with her charm. She would go to any length to please. She needed to be accepted really on a visceral level, not the way most of us need to be accepted — kind of casually.
  • Fred Eberstadt, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• It was sad but not shocking. There was something about Edie that said, "This is a one-act play. It's not going to go on forever."
  • Fred Eberstadt, on Edie's death, in Edie : Girl On Fire, David Weisman and Melissa Painter. (Chronicle Books, 2006)

• Edie Sedgwick was close with all those people who were close to the Kennedys. Edie had affairs with a couple of them, didn't she? I think one would come in the front door and the other brother would go out the back. So it was at the same time, but not the same minute. Everyone knew that. I loved Bobby Kennedy. He was my political idol. Sometimes Edie would say about Bobby, "Oh, he was so cute and cuddly," but I wasn't going to ask her about him. I mean, what are you going to ask, "Does he have a big dick?"
  • Danny Fields, as quoted in Please Kill Me : The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.

• You knew that you couldn't really have her, everybody knew that, that she was doomed. You just knew that.
  • Danny Fields, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She was something of a wild child but there was such an innocence about her and a childlike thing at the same time … She was just so sweet, you know. There was just no malice in her.
  • Sally Grossman, w:Albert Grossman's wife, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• There seemed to be this almost supernatural glow to her that's hard to describe. Literally there was an aura emanating from her, a white or blue aura. It's as if Edie was illuminated from within. Her skin was translucent — Marilyn Monroe had that quality.
  • Robert Heide, as quoted in Factory Girl, David Dalton.

• Her looks, her expressions, I think, were her sense of humour.
  • Jane Holzer, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She was a sweet simple girl. I don't know the other sides of Edie. I know the sweet, wide-eyed, enthusiastic Edie.
  • Betsey Johnson, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I went to the bathroom and there I saw the most incredible creature I have ever seen, and it was this young woman with alabaster skin, incredibly pale, paler than me actually, which was difficult to do. She had short, Jean Seberg kind of platinum hair, and the shortest, shortest, shortest garment I've ever seen on anybody ever, also white...So I was looking at this creature...and I see her in the mirror with an eyeliner pencil, painting a scar on her forehead in black with cross-stitches...I don't know what it meant, but I was terrified.
  • Larissa, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She loved the things she did not know. She was eager to learn, not in the way of a pupil, but somehow in the way of an artist.
  • Donald Lyons, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She was incredibly absorbing and retentive, and it all came fresh to her...You got the impression that the creature, that Edie, was made literally by Zeus three weeks ago, that there was no past to her, save what she picked up from books and people. With her there was no traditional structure, no formal structure. She indeed would compare Raymond Chandler or Jane Austen or ancient Rome to what she experienced last night with the tuna fish, but it was marvelous and fresh.
  • Donald Lyons, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• When I knew her, she was not of this Earth. She was, indeed, never of this Earth. She was born of madness and suffering and declined into madness and suffering. But she had a period when the sun shone for her, when life was smiling. And she was smiling with it.
  • Donald Lyons, in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006), David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Warren [Beatty] told me that Edie Sedgwick, she wanted to meet him, so he said "OK" cause he was curious, as any red-blooded American male would have been. She came over and he said she had a completely see-through raincoat on and nothing on underneath it. Isn't that funny? He didn't fuck her. Isn't that unusual?
  • Madonna, in Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)

• She wasn't very good...She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances.
  • Norman Mailer, on why he declined to cast her in his play, The Deer Park, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• When we were riding in the limousine, after Edie had just come out of Capezio, and had just bought brand new shoes, she was carrying on about how she loved the shoes. Had spent a lot of money on them. And after taking a second look at them, she decided she didn't like them, rolled down the window and threw them out. That's the essential Edie. Not a happy person.
  • Sterling Morrison of The Velvet Underground, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She actually walked out on us, she said, "I am tired of making these films with Andy Warhol, I don't like the scripts, I don't want to learn the scripts, I think he makes me look ridiculous sometimes." You know, she was really upset about how she felt she appeared in Warhol movies, even though everyone else thought she was fantastic.
  • Billy Name, on why Edie departed The Factory, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• That is unusual, to look like you had just walked out of a fairy tale. She had nothing human about her, just mystery.
  • Ivy Nicholson, a former Factory regular, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Some things you are born to, and Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs whoever gave them to her.
  • Nico, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Anybody who could tell a girl like Edie Sedgwick that she was being stabbed in the back by Andy Warhol, of all people, were idiots, it's where she got her fame and basically the reason why Edie was even known was because of Warhol. Let's just face it, it's all Warhol, Warhol, Warhol. People turned her against Warhol for their own devious reasons. They convinced her she was the next Marilyn Monroe. I think personally she was a great screen presence. But I don't think she was the next Marilyn Monroe because she wasn't a Hollywood type. Who would use her out in Hollywood?
  • Factory regular, Ondine. The Austin Chronicle magazine, October 2003.

• After Ciao! Manhattan she came back to the Factory and we tried to make a movie with her, Warhol and I, but we just wiped our hands of her, there was nothing we could do with her. How many times can you tell a person to stop doing something without really getting bored with it? I'd never seen Warhol walk away from his camera in a fit of just absolute, abject disgust but during that filming, a little movie of his called Edie and Ondine he just said, "Stop, I won't film anymore." He said "this is disgusting, just absolutely disgusting." She was so full of self-pity and so humble and so everything else it was just awful, it was horrible, intolerable.
  • Factory regular, Ondine. The Austin Chronicle magazine, October 2003.

• I think Edie was one of those personages. When you came in contact with her, you came away with a deep impression of her. And then she moved in circles where almost automatically with that impression came a story or some sort of an event or a happening. Everywhere she went things began to buzz and happen around her.
  • George Plimpton, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Even in her most far-out sort of state she had tremendous appeal. That's what was so incredible about her, is that she could be really spaced beyond belief, and she still could put a sentence together that would blow your brains out … That one-upmanship kind of thing.
  • Michael Post, Edie's husband, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created.
  • Robert Rauschenberg, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie wasn't crazy in any way, shape or form...drugs would simulate madness.
  • René Ricard, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She made you feel privileged to be there.
  • René Ricard, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• It was a hot, bright day, and she wore sunglasses, a tight blouse, and short pants. I was spellbound. Edie livened up the meal considerably by skipping out on dessert to slip out through the French doors to the backyard, where she stripped down to her panties to sunbathe half naked — I remember nothing but a sense of spectacular whiteness against the green lawn — while the grownups sipped coffee from demitasse cups, unaware.
  • John Sedgwick, Edie's cousin, recalling a visit to his father's home, in In My Blood : Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (2007)

• When she was walking along the street, she dropped her purse and a whole bunch of reds and things fell out. A cop car pulled up, 'What ya doing?' And then the cops get the idea that she was carrying drugs on her. So they got out and threw her up against the car, her hands up over the hood, at which point her purse spilled open again and they're whites, the reds falling everywhere! The cop who had pushed her against the car turned around and began picking up the stuff, so she wheeled around and gave him a kick in the ass man, with all the energy and hate she could. The court put Edie on probation for 5 years. After the bust she became a patient at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick, Edie's brother, describing her arrest in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I think as she got older, the recklessness got stronger, and it really would have been far more brave for her to try to do otherwise than what she was doing. She was the opposite of brave. She let the tide carry her along. And the tide was a destructive one, and she became a smaller and smaller speck as she simply let herself be swept along in its flow.
  • Robin Sedgwick, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I was a great, great friend of Edie Sedgwick … Edie and I were in several of the early Andy Warhol films … Edie was beautiful beyond words. She was absolutely breath-taking and a very sweet person. Edie was a precious person. She was heavily into drugs which caused her death. … Edie was very glamorous. And truly beautiful, breathtaking, and I think it was a great loss she died so young.
  • Artist Harold Stevenson, as quoted in "American Art Icon Calls Idabel home" in McCurtain Daily Gazette (27 February 2006)

• Edie loved parties. Edie adored parties. It was a very comfortable party. People dancing. The moon rose out of the ocean, spiraling up in the dark. It was the final touch — a nice moon rippling on the ocean and turning everything silver. Edie was very sensitive to enchantments. She broke away from the form completely and was doing these totally free dance movements. We looked out from under the marquee, and there she was on this deserted lawn. And she was cartwheeling across it, cartwheeling. I remember the music dying down as the focus of attention shifted to her out there.
  • John Anthony Walker, recalling when Edie visited Fishers Island as a weekend guest of his in the Spring of 1964, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie had disappeared. It was a bit spooky. Somebody said, "We saw her go swimming." She was nowhere in sight on this beach. "Is that her? Way, way out?" Edie was way out...a little dark head...such a distance. She seemed to be going under and then surfacing again. I could see the shine of her legs as she dove. It was like her dancing the night before. She was playing … totally natural and involved in the element of water; she was like a porpoise. She seemed only to exist freely in atmospheres that were removed or enchanted … most people are happy swimming by the shore, but she was happy out there.
  • John Anthony Walker, recalling when Edie visited Fishers Island as a weekend guest of his in the Spring of 1964, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• One person in the sixties fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known. And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love. now. But her name is still going. It seems incredible, doesn't it?
  • Andy Warhol, in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

• She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody's private fantasies. She could be anything you wanted her to be — a little girl, a woman, intelligent, dumb, rich, poor — anything. She was a wonderful, beautiful blank. The mystique to end all mystiques.
  • Andy Warhol, in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

• She was also a compulsive liar; she just couldn't tell the truth about anything. And what an actress. She could really turn on the tears. She could somehow always make you believe her — that's how she got what she wanted.
  • Andy Warhol, in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

• Sort of Egyptian, with her head tilting in just the right, beautiful way. People called it 'The Sedgwick', and Edie was the only one who did it — everybody else was doing The Jerk.
  • Andy Warhol, on Edie's dance moves, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She'd be off to a jet-set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip.
  • Chuck Wein, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie saw herself as tough like a little tomboy.
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie was very smart, you know, too smart. Because she came from such an insular place, she had an interesting commentary on what went by, 'cause she saw it like it was rather than in some social context like we all would.
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

External links

• Profile at IMDb
• Blast Magazine Article "Girl on Fire"
• Profile at Find a Grave