The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (The Maidens Quotes)
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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
“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
“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.” (The Maidens Quotes)
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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
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
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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.” (The Maidens Quotes)
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“Reading about life was no preparation for living it.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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
“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
“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 should always pay attention when our body tells us something.”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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 can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them,”
Alex Michaelides
The Maidens
“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
