Sharon Tate Quotations

Sharon Marie Tate was an American actress, model, wife of Roman Polański, and the most famous murder victim of Charles Manson and his followers.

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I'd like to be a fairy princess — a little golden doll with gossamer wings, in a voile dress, adorned with bright, shiny things. I see that as something totally pure and beautiful. Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent. I'm very sensitive to ugly situations. I'm quick to read people, and I pick up if someone's reacting to me as just a sexy blonde. At times like that, I freeze. I can be very alone at a party, on the set, or in general, if I'm not in harmony with things around me.
- As quoted in "Who I'd Like To Be In My Next Life"] featuring celebrity responses to that question, Eye magazine Vol. 2 No. 1 (January 1969) - online text and images

I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
- As quoted in Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000) by Greg King

Please — please don't kill me — I don't want to die. I just want to have my baby.
- Court testimony of Virginia Graham as to what her confessed murderer Susan Atkins (aka Sadie Mae Glutz) had said were among her last words. Atkins said she responded to this with: "Look, bitch, you might as well face it right now, you're going to die, and I don't feel a thing behind it."

Dear God, she was beautiful. Sharon was more beautiful as a teenager than she was in her twenties; in Europe people would turn around on the street just to look at her.
- Doris Tate, Sharon's mother.

I know I was horrible at times, I was. I really kept a tight rein on, I had to. I felt fine about Sharon being a star, as long as I was close by. You cannot protect your kids, you just can't. There are twenty-four hours in a day.
- Doris Tate

Until you have lost a child, you don't know what it is. Parents are supposed to die first. When your child is gone before you for an abnormal reason, it creates a whole abnormal situation... It was three years before I could even... I couldn't even look at Roman. Because, you see, I still expected Sharon to be with him, so I was playing games in my mind... Roman really loved Sharon, I know that, and he was very, very grieved.
- Doris Tate

This could destroy Roman. Marriage vows mean nothing to him but few men have adored a woman as much as he adored Sharon.
- Laurence Harvey, after the murder of Tate.

While I was working on Downward Spiral, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed. Then one day I met her sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: 'Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house? 'For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred. ' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?
- Trent Reznor

Interview by Marcia Borie Screenland (November 1969)

Sharon Tate was my best friend. Once, we were roommates. She introduced me to my husband. She was the godmother to my baby daughter who is named for her. In the six years time that I knew her, she never said an unkind word about anyone.

My friends used to tease me. 'How can you wake up in the morning and look at that face of hers?' It was a good question. Sharon was so over whelmingly, so incredibly beautiful that anyone not knowing her might think it took a lot to live with such a beauty. But you see that was another thing about Sharon. With all her beauty, everyone loved her. I never heard anyone say a bad word about her, not even another actress. And in this town that's not only a rarity, it's an impossibility!

Sharon was the type of a girl who had no defenses, no pretenses, she was just herself all the time... She was so trusting, so eager to accept people as they were, so generous... Sharon never shut her door to anyone.

She always had a way of finding such goodness in others. If someone hurt her, she'd say, "Oh, Sheliah, I'm sure they didn't mean to.' She'd always make excuses for others. Sharon was just totally loving and also totally vulnerable. She was just a remarkable person, she never gave up on anybody.

As far as Sharon's marriage was concerned, all I can tell you is that Sharon and Roman were in love. They were a combination of beauty and genius.

She was always going out on a limb for everyone. Everyone but herself. There was an ethereal quality about her. She had this thing I sometimes wished I'd had, even though I knew that eventually it might be bad for me. Do you understand? She had this kind of beauty and fragility, and you just knew she was bound to get hurt because of it. But still you couldn't help but admiring that quality in her. She was just such a special person.

In just the last few months Sharon was beginning to come into her own. She never cared about being beautiful. She never even really cared about acting. She just wanted to love and be loved. And have her baby. I know that if she'd lived and had the baby everything would have been different for her. Because that is what Sharon really wanted. She was just a little girl from Texas who was so incredibly beautiful that she got swept up in all of the Hollywood nonsense. But all she ever wanted was what every woman wants — a man to love and a baby of her own. I can't believe that the murderers knew her. To know Sharon, to really know her, was to love her. There is just no way that anyone who knew her could have hurt her so.

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