Sedgwick Quotes

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two. ~ Ellery Sedgwick

Temporal grace,' said the Doctor. 'No weapons can function inside the TARDIS – even something as simple as a spear. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I've been making a diary of the daft things people have said during London Fashion Week, and it does wear a little bit thin, everyone comparing my name to Edie Sedgwick. ~ Edie Campbell

Sometimes when you do a part, the wall between you and the characters can be very porous. You can sort of move in and out of your character's persona and being. And that just couldn't happen on this one because of working with him. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

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 bri ~ Patti Smith

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 ~ Karl Wiggins

I'm not going to be remotely funny. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

Eric Seven does not believe in love at first sight.
He corrects himself.
Even in that moment, the moment that it happens, he fees his journalist's brain make a correction, rubbing out a long-held belief, writing a new one in its place.
He did not believe in love at first sight. He thinks he might do so now. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

If. The smallest word, which raises the biggest questions. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

All these many-coloured feelings fell... like light on a black surface, producing no change, meeting no return. ~ Catharine Maria Sedgwick

There never was a story that was happy through and through. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

While I was girl of the year and superstar and all that crap, everything I did was really ... motivated by psychological disturbance. ~ Edie Sedgwick

If we {Federalists] must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures. Under Adams as under Jefferson, the government shall sink. The party in the hands of whose chief it shall sink will sink with it - and the advantage will be all on the side of his adversaries. ~ Alexander Hamilton

People think I have so much faith in myself, but I have none. I have no faith in myself, or in what I can do, and yet people think I can do anything I want.
That's how I seem, but it's an illusion. It's an act, nothing more. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Also everyone's hearts are in the right place when you do a small movie. You're not doing it for the money; you're not doing it for the possibility of an Oscar nomination. You are doing it because you love the material. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

We cannot take one step in geology without drawing upon the fathomless stores of by-gone time. ~ Adam Sedgwick

Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

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

Global climate change is real. The legislative branch of our government is our last line of defense against pollution which is why I am so grateful to have the NRDC making our voice heard. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

I might have been normal but if I was I cannot remember that time. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Maybe he knows noting. Maybe it's that he feels it all, but whatever is happening to him, he understands that he lived before. He lived other lives, in different times. And why not? It's something he has often wondered about, sitting on the train in the morning, looking from the corner of his eye at the other commuter, wondering why.
Why am I not living that person's live? That man, there, with the sharp suit and the slightly stupid tie? Or that scruffy guy with the headphones? Or that woman, a little pregnant?
Often, as he sat fiddling with OneDegree, he has wondered why this life is the one he's had, and not one of the thousands of contacts passing through his device, or one of the countless others that could have been his.
Now he knows. He has been others. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Perhaps what matters," Sunstein muses, "is not whether people are right on the facts, but whether they are frightened." And people do seem to be frightened. We are locking our doors and pulling our children out of public school and buying guns and ritually sanitizing our hands to allay a wide range of fears, most of which are essentially fears of other people. All the while we are also, in our way, reckless. We get intoxicated, from the Latin "to poison," for fun. This contradiction leads Sunstein to worry that regulatory laws based on the priorities of the general public maybe prone to a pattern of "paranoia and neglect." Too much attention may be spent on minimal risks, while too little is paid to pressing threats. Paranoia, the theorist Eve Sedgwick observes, tends to be contagious. She calls it a "strong theory," meaning a wide-ranging, reductive theory that displaces other ways of thinking. And paranoia very frequently passes for intelligence. As Sedgwick observes, "to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant." She does not believe that paranoid thinking is necessarily delusional or wrong, but only that there is value to approaches that are less rooted in suspicion. "Paranoia," Sedgwick writes, "knows some things well and others poorly. ~ Eula Biss

Worry is a complete circle of inefficient thought whirling about a pivot of fear. To avoid it, consider whether the problem in hand is your business. If it is not, turn to something that is. If it is your business, decide if it is your business now. If so, decide what is best to be done about it. If you know, get busy. If you don't know, find out promptly. Do these things; then rest your case on the determination that, no matter how hard things may turn out to be, you will amek the best of them - and more than that no man can do. Dr. Austen Fox Riggs ~ John Sedgwick

I think that women as a group are so powerful. I still don't think we are able to embrace our power well enough yet. We think we live in a man's world and we have to follow their rules, and yet, we're so different, and our rules are so different. I wish that we could come together more as a political force. If women ran the world, I don't believe that there would be war. I really don't ... We understand the bigger picture. We understand our impact on the environment, on the world. We understand the generations that will go after us because we gave birth to them. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

It's easier in some ways being on the life raft and the other guy's in the boat and you can row alongside and be supportive. In some ways, that's an easier role. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

All he felt was that same feeling he'd always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn't even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night and with his father had gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name. Home. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

There is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for the concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts! ~ Adam Sedgwick

I'm just a girl in a nurse's uniform, but that doesn't mean I know how to save these men, and they- they are men in uniforms, but that doesn't mean they know how to die. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I've always been able to let stuff go when I'm done with work. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

It's sort of like a mockery, in a way of reality because they think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers where there is something bitter to taste. And to pretend there isn't is foolish. I mean the ones that wander 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. ~ Edie Sedgwick

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

Kate Sedgwick. That name holds so much power over me. The best kind of power: inspiring, encouraging, and respectable. It's a name that I've always associated with badass bravery. It's a name that always meant anything was possible. It's a name that was love and goodness and kindness. ~ Kim Holden

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic presence, then, the gay studies movement, what distinctive soundings are to be reached by posing the question our way - and staying for an answer? Let's see how it sounds.

Has there ever been a gay Socrates?

Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare?

Has there ever been a gay Proust?

Does the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Secondly, I continued my education in a more important way,
through the observation of everyone around me,
because nothing is more important to learn in life than
the interaction of a human being with another human being. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

But when you're in something together, it's very hard to be objective and you're very subjective. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection? ~ Marcus Sedgwick

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

God never gives you more than you can handle. It's your choice on how you deal with what he gives you. You can either grow from it, or you can lie down and give up. ~ Kendra Sedgwick

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day. ~ Adam Sedgwick

The pretended physical philosophy of modern days strips Man of all his moral attributes, or holds them of no account in the estimate of his origin and place in the created world. ~ Adam Sedgwick

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who thinks about the most, because he wished he'd been more like Mat when he was young.
If he'd been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn't have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only came along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it? ~ Marcus Sedgwick

If I were dead, I wouldn't be sad, and I wouldn't be glad, because I wouldn't be. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

My style is Edie Sedgwick meets Grace Jones, or Audrey Hepburn meets Salt 'n' Pepa. Strong and feisty but still classic. ~ Estelle

She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love! ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I am always doing what I thought I couldn't do because I Thought I might learn something.
Henri Marcel French Artist ~ Brenda H. Sedgwick

Democracy's real test lies in its respect for minority opinion. ~ Ellery Sedgwick

He put a ring in the toe of a stocking. On Christmas Eve, we opened our stockings and it was there at the bottom of the toe. Then he got down on his knees and he was shaking. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

He wonders if a few moments of utter and total joy can be worth a lifetime of struggle.
Maybe, he thinks. Maybe, if they're the right moments. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carried a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

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. ~ Edie Sedgwick

Modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I don't know if you're married, but sometimes there are times where one is really together with their partner. And then there are times when you're both just in your own thing, but you're there together. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

To be included in the group with women like Glenn Close and Kyra Sedgwick is a little bit astonishing to me. To even be mentioned in the same sentence as Glenn Close is just ridiculous. ~ Julianna Margulies

One final time I told myself I wasn't abducting my little brother. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I was always fraught with guilt, and it's such a waste of an emotion. It keeps you out of the moment of being where you are. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

Often we look to the easiest ways to help - give money, give food - but presence is also an aspect of giving. ~ Shannon Sedgwick Davis

The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he'd been looking for something and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Volcanic action is essentially paroxysmal; yet Mr. Lyell will admit no greater paroxysms than we ourselves have witnessed-no periods of feverish spasmodic energy, during which the very framework of nature has been convulsed and torn asunder. The utmost movements that he allows are a slight quivering of her muscular integuments. ~ Adam Sedgwick

I was very young when we got married and I don't know why it worked out like it did or how I was smart enough to know that this was the right guy, but somehow I got lucky. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex. ~ Adam Sedgwick

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions! ~ Adam Sedgwick

One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as much as one does the things of Spring. ~ Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Yet every writer worth a good-god damn knows this too, for it is graven into each of us: no one cares for beauty. Not in fiction. Not on its own, not pure, untroubled beauty; not in fiction. [...] For here is the only real difference between the life of reality and the life of fiction. Fiction only works when the beauty is tainted by pain. For fiction is not about life; it's about the troubles of life. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I do know that I have to work hard for every single thing that I get, really hard, and that's okay. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I see you're in a hurry to get someplace. It's a great mistake to hurry." "Why?" Joe asked, puzzled by almost everything the traveler said. "Because the grave's our destination," Mr. Sedgwick said. "Those who hurry usually get to it quicker than those who take their time. ~ Larry McMurtry

That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.) ~ Maggie Nelson

You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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

She didn't belong on this planet, yet she somehow touched everyone who came into contact with her ~ Karl Wiggins

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. ~ Edie Sedgwick

Considered as a mere question of physics, (and keeping all moral considerations entirely out of sight,) the appearance of man is a geological phenomenon of vast importance, indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature. ~ Adam Sedgwick

You know they used to use nails," he says. "In the old days. Poor folks still do. Not the best idea, a nail in a coffin." Bowman says nothing, but in his mind, he asks, Coffin? The man nods, smiling. He picks up something now, and shows it to Bowman, for inspection. It is a long brass screw. "That's better," he says. "Better than a nail. Notice anything about it?" Bowman shakes his head. "The screw runs widdershins. Back to front. 'Gainst the clock. All the other screws in the world turn the other way to this one. But coffin screws are different. " Bowman forms a word in his mind. Why? The coffin maker smiles. "To stop them from coming back, of course. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

The future, and the future alone, is the home of explanation. ~ Henry Dwight Sedgwick

If I had ever, in any medium, seen any researcher or popularizer refer even once to any supposedly ay-producing circumstance as the proper hormone balance, or the conducive endocrine environment, for gay generation, I would be less chilled by the breezes of all this technological confidence. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

If there's one thing a goblin hates more than being poor, it's being dead. ~ Jamie Sedgwick

Have you ever noticed the softness of a kitten's feet? - they are like raspberries to hold in one's hand. ~ Anne Douglas Sedgwick

I think in this movie, every time I see his work, I'm blown away by it because he, to me, he really embodied the character so powerfully and so real, so truthfully to me. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

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. ~ David Dalton

One of the advantages of having a binary vascular system was that he could always pump his blood faster than normal if he chose to, raising his body temperature at will. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

I have too much respect for the characters I play to make them anything but as real as they can possibly be. I have a great deal of respect for all of them, otherwise I wouldn't do them. And I don't want to screw them by not portraying them honestly. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

We do spend time talking about it and we puzzle through it together. We ride the roller coasters together - the high highs and the low lows. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

I think Stella Tennant is amazing. And then I really loved all those '60s society models, like Edie Sedgwick. ~ Edie Campbell

I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve! ~ Catharine Sedgwick

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself. ~ John Sedgwick

Rebels are the people who refuse the seen for the unseen. ~ Anne Douglas Sedgwick

You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. ~ Edie Sedgwick

He'd watch the loading and unloading of boats; the building of houses, shacks, and huts; and above all, the people, each carrying a bundle of stories inside them. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

You know, I grew up with brothers so I'm used to being the only girl. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

It's not that I don't see myself as hot and sexy. Don't get me wrong. No, it's not that. ~ Kyra Sedgwick

That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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. ~ Edie Sedgwick

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

The ability of anyone in the culture to support and honour gay kids may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay adults may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into gay adults. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick