This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge, completely unafraid of life's more frightening opportu...
Before New York, the cracks were already there, but now they began to split open and gape, and the difference between how a thing or a place or a person appears and the reality becomes alarmingly visible, garish.
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 ar...
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. Unfortunate...
I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate wor...
Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]
And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and...
Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness.
New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone - it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic.
Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.
...she could not stick by the golden mean...was always anxious to experiment in extremes...to find out what was enough by indulging herself in too much." (Gordon Lameyer)
When I was doing the Mademoiselle application my husband would peer over my shoulder and say, "What are you doing competing with the best brains in the country? Why don't you just wash the dishes?" When the telegram came from Mademoiselle, I ran outs...
Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.
Cyrilly expected Sylvia – as an intelligent and ambitious young woman – to walk around pale-mouthed and flat-shoed. She saw intellectual inclinations and a taste for fashion as mutually exclusive and assumed that Sylvia would not mind missing fas...
All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew "cottons with big full skirts and university personalities" would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban.
These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.
Sylvia quotes Dick as telling her: "I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want." Dick was sharp enough to understand that the bright flame that drew him to Sylv...
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.
We knew she [Sylvia] was unusual, because of the seriousness with which she was treated, the lofty importance of her job as guest managing editor, and because she was kept fast at her desk when the rest of us were allowed to fool around….I remember...
Sylvia possessed a deeply conditioned respect for authority. She wanted desperately to live up to the expectations of a society that viewed her as a bright, charming, enormously talented disciple of bourgeois conformity. On the other hand, she ached ...
