Alex Michaelides Quotes

Alex Michaelides

Alex Michaelides is a bestselling British-Cypriot author and screenwriter. (Alex Michaelides Quotes)

“A baby’s first sense of self comes through its parents’ gaze. We are born being watched – our parents’ expressions, what we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes, determines how we see ourselves.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“About how we often mistake love for fireworks—for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm—and constant.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks—for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm—and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love—in the true sense of the word.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“After all, everyone’s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I’m not. I’m the villain.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“After we die, all that remains of us is a mystery; and our possessions, of course, to be picked over by strangers.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Despite my best homicidal fantasies, I wasn’t a murderer. I couldn’t kill him. I’d have to think of something cleverer than that.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Don’t glorify the events of your life and try to give them meaning. There is no meaning. Life means nothing. Death means nothing. But she didn’t always think that way.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Everyone’s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I’m not. I’m the villain.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Farmers, like kings, have need of many sons.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Forgiveness could not be coerced – it was experienced spontaneously, as an act of grace, appearing only when a person was ready.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“I believe that children will do anything to be loved. When they’re very young, it’s a matter of physical, then psychological survival. They’ll do whatever it takes to be cared for. And some people take advantage of that.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“I was crying for all of us. There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“If you’re not aware of the transcendent, if you’re not awake to the glorious mystery of life and death that you’re lucky enough to be part of – if that doesn’t fill you with joy and strike you with awe … you might as well not be alive.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“It felt as if a kind of pestilence, a plague, were spreading through the college—as in a Greek myth, the sickness that destroyed Thebes; an invisible airborne poison drifting through the courtyards—and these ancient walls, once a refuge from the outside world, no longer offered any protection.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“It must be obvious – the answer must be right there in front of her. But still, she couldn’t grasp it – it was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“It was strange, how moments of extreme clarity often had the same texture as drunkenness.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“It’s important to keep looking ahead. You mustn’t forever look back, over your shoulder. Think about the future.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“It’s not easy, being so open and receptive to another human being, you’re able to feel their feelings … It’s a poisoned chalice in many ways. I’ve always thought so.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Mariana might not be a detective, but she was a therapist, and she knew how to listen. To listen not only to what was being said, but also to everything unsaid, all the words unspoken – the lies, evasions, projections, transferences, and other psychological phenomena that occurred between two people.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“My argument with so much of psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. —ARTHUR MILLER” (Alex Michaelides Quotes)
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“My mother would always run and hide while it went on, smuggling a bottle of vodka into the bathroom, into the shower, where she thought her tears couldn’t be heard. And I would go to the farthest part of the farm, as far away as I could get. I’d cover my ears, but I still heard the screaming.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to—and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Once you kill another human being, there’s no going back. I see that now. I see I have become altogether a different person. It’s a bit like being reborn, I suppose. But no ordinary birth – it’s a metamorphosis. What emerges from the ashes is not a phoenix, but an uglier creature: deformed, incapable of flight, a predator using its claws to cut and rip.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid, anxious.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Reading about life was no preparation for living it.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Ruth always said that forgiveness could not be coerced – it was experienced spontaneously, as an act of grace, appearing only when a person was ready.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“Sometimes it takes courage, you know, and a long time, to be honest.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“That was the funniest part of this whole performance: watching you play detective. You’re not the detective … You’re the victim.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“Trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“We all secretly hope that tragedy will only ever happen to other people. But Mariana knew, sooner or later, it happens to you.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration – we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“We often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant.” (Alex Michaelides Quotes)
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“We should always pay attention when our body tells us something.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“What sheltered lives we live here in the cloister – naive, perhaps even wilfully ignorant of the horrors of the outside world.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“You become increasingly comfortable with madness – and not just the madness of others, but your own. We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them,”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”
Alex Michaelides
The Silent Patient

“You’re a beautiful woman, but you have more than beauty. You have a certain quality – a stillness. Like the stillness in the depths of the ocean, far beneath the waves, where nothing moves. Very still … and very sad.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens