40 Quotes by Elizabeth Winder

The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.

Sylvia would have taken it seriously- so strong was her devotion to the innate intelligence of form. Those pretty tools like glue and pens, pasting together look-books – for Sylvia it would have been like toy making or arranging jewels. Unfortunately, Sylvia’s flair for design and graphics went unnoticed by the Mademoiselle staff, who had already pigeonholed her as a “writer”.

She was more fun to compliment that anyone in the world - she'd smile and say "Gee thanks!" and look like you'd made her day.

Out of the blue Sylvia said, ‘People are like boxes. You would like to open them up and see what’s inside, but you can’t.’ Sylvia was interested in people and recognizing how individuals create their own kind of camouflage- the ‘lids on the boxes’, so to speak.

I've lived long enough to know that life doesn't always stick to the rules...The perfectly impossible and absolutely ridiculous keep happening all the time.

For years I wondered what was her curious power, her ability to attract all kinds of people to her and to use them for her own ends, often with their knowledge. i think it was that people liked watching and being with someone who enjoyed life as much as Sylvia seemed to enjoy it. She squeezed all the juice from the orange, or, to change the figure, drained the cup to the leaves, the very dregs.

Life happens so fast and furiously that there is hardly any time to assimilate it.

Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy’s red-baiting paranoia.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which “rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future”. That was Sylvia’s genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.