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.

— Elizabeth Winder

And is not all life material-based on the material-permeated by the material? Shouldn't 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 vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent!

— Elizabeth Winder

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.

— Elizabeth Winder

Cyril expected Sylvia – as an intelligent and ambitious young woman – to walk around pale-mouthed and flashed. She saw intellectual inclinations and a taste for fashion as mutually exclusive and assumed that Sylvia would not mind missing fashion shows to work late in the office.

— Elizabeth Winder

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.

— Elizabeth Winder

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

— Elizabeth Winder

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]

— Elizabeth Winder

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.

— Elizabeth Winder

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 words that ring true.

— Elizabeth Winder

It is perhaps fortunate that Sylvia was oblivious to the commotion behind the scenes. Apparently, Henry O. Teacher had written a letter to Betsy Talbot Blackwell, warning her that one of her guest editors was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

— Elizabeth Winder