Sheila Weller > Quotes

“and were willing to suffer pain if necessary.” A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme—so whimsical, sensual, and urgent—that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn’t had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco—glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls—was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term “flower children” would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam.”
― Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

“enterprise”
― Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

“A mother who underestimates a little girl can eventually be written off as unsupportive, but a mother who sees her daughter’s best self even before she does is harder to disengage from.”
― Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

“determined to go on and do her job and we”
― Sheila Weller, The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour-and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News

“Carly had seemed absolutely clear-eyed in her interview with James in Rolling Stone, pronouncing “junk” one of the addictions that was socially “unacceptable” as well as “self-destructive.” She had spoken of how loving a man with an addictive personality had only made her see more keenly drugs’ insidiousness. (“I snorted cocaine a couple of times, but it was never as bad to me as when I saw James getting into it.”) But, as she would realize eight years later, “I didn’t go into [the marriage] with a great deal of projection about the future. I was caught up in the moment. I just knew I was very much in love with James and I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life.” In that way she was typical of her times.”
― Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation