Jean Stein > Quotes

“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.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“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.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“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.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“Lots of people go back to other hospitals but not to Bloomingdale. It cured me. It made me feel if I was ever to commit suicide again, it had to be done. No more attempts. No more games.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“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.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“This tape is supposed to be about love, and I guess the distortions of love. The Love Tape. Do you have any questions you want to ask me?”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“Instead of being distressed by the huge moral discrepancy between the myth of Hollywood and its current reality, most of them only saw what already had been fixed in their minds. It was absolutely eerie and sent me right back to The Day of the Locust. The point that Nathanael West made, of course, is that the masses ultimately want to kill and devour, to cannibalize their celebrity gods.”
― Jean Stein, West of Eden: An American Place

“You see, we have all the makings of a real beautiful dictatorship. And what is holding it back is a tradition stemming out of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. That’s it. And if that center doesn’t hold, you will find the sweetest dictatorship you will ever want to look for. Many of them are men of goodwill, and they do not understand the delicacy of liberty, how easily it can be destroyed.”
― Jean Stein, West of Eden: An American Place

“Judge Sedgwick’s daughter, Catharine. She was a spinster and a novelist in the early 1800s and the author of A New England Tale”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“Singing Beach on the North Shore of Boston. Do you know the beach? It’s called Singing Beach because the sand sings in this strange way under your bare feet when you run across it.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“But as Ram Dass once said, you know, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a weekend with your parents.”
― Jean Stein, West of Eden: An American Place

“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”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl