Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”

— Alex Michaelides

2. “We can’t take part in therapy if we feel unsafe. Boundaries make us feel safe. Boundaries are what therapy is about.”

— Alex Michaelides

3. “Plato said the soul was a circle – which made sense to Mariana. Life was a circle too, wasn’t it? – from birth to death.”

— Alex Michaelides

4. “But that’s what Alicia did for you. Her silence was like a mirror – reflecting yourself back at you. And it was often an ugly sight.”

— Alex Michaelides

5. “Recuerda, el amor que no implica sinceridad no merece el nombre de amor.”

— Alex Michaelides

6. “You don’t need to be mad to work here, but it helps”?”

— Alex Michaelides

7. “She used to say we are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and that a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time.”

— Alex Michaelides

8. “Please believe in yourself and pay no heed to negative voices, inside or outside your head. And keep going.”

— Alex Michaelides

9. “It was written” is the Greek expression. Meaning, quite simply, from that moment on, their destinies were sealed.”

— Alex Michaelides

10. “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

— Alex Michaelides

11. “No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

— Alex Michaelides

12. “Rats desert a sinking ship. They don’t clamber on board.”

— Alex Michaelides

13. “In group therapy, the group, not the individual, is the focus of treatment: to be a successful group therapist is – to some extent – to be invisible.”

— Alex Michaelides

14. “A trainee who is not anxious will be sick.”

— Alex Michaelides

15. “I didn’t kill Gabriel. Gabriel killed me. All I did was pull the trigger.”

— Alex Michaelides

16. “Ali prava ljubav je vrlo tiha, vrlo mirna. Dosadna je, ako se promatra iz perspektive velike drame. Ljubav je duboka i mirna – i konstantna.”

— Alex Michaelides

17. “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. I’m terrified of myself – and of my mother in me. Is her madness in my blood? Is it? Am I going to – No. Stop. Stop – I’m not writing about that. I’m not.”

— Alex Michaelides

18. “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, calm, and constant.”

— Alex Michaelides

19. “Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters.”

— Alex Michaelides

20. “As human beings, in our earliest years we reside in a land before memory.”

— Alex Michaelides

21. “The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain.”

— Alex Michaelides

22. “I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown. I like to know where I’m going. That’s why I always make so many sketches – trying to control the outcome – no wonder nothing comes to life – because I’m not really responding to what’s going on in front of me. I need to open my eyes and look – and be aware of life as it is happening, and not simply how I want it to be.”

— Alex Michaelides

23. “The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. – JEAN ANOUILH, Antigone.”

— Alex Michaelides

24. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. – SIGMUND FREUD.”

— Alex Michaelides

25. “I was pursued by an infernal, relentless chorus of furies, all with his voice – shrieking that I was worthless, shameful, a failure.”

— Alex Michaelides

26. “About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still.”

— Alex Michaelides

27. “How can one drowning rat save another?”

— Alex Michaelides

28. “There was a word for this moment in Greek tragedy: anagnorisis – recognition – the moment the hero finally sees the truth and understands his fate – and how it’s always been there, the whole time, in front of him. Mariana used to wonder what that moment felt like. Now she knew.”

— Alex Michaelides

29. “Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way.”

— Alex Michaelides

30. “As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others – we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents.”

— Alex Michaelides

31. “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

32. “Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

— Alex Michaelides

33. “Ah. I see.” Ruth nodded. “We’ve talked about this before. Haven’t we?” “About fireworks?” “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

34. “As I listened, I looked up at the white clouds drifting past. Finally, they had opened – it had started to snow – snowflakes were falling outside. I opened the window and reached out my hand. I caught a snowflake. I watched it disappear, vanish from my fingertip. I smiled. And I went to catch another one.”

— Alex Michaelides

35. “Todos estamos locos, creo yo, solo que en diferente grado.”

— Alex Michaelides

36. “The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others – we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons. Who.”

— Alex Michaelides

37. “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

38. “Love is deep and calm – and constant.”

— Alex Michaelides

39. “I felt an unfamiliar happiness just being in her company, as though a secret door had been opened, and Kathy had beckoned me across the threshold – into a magical world of warmth and light and color, and hundreds of orchids in a dazzling confetti of blues and reds and yellows.”

— Alex Michaelides

40. “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.”

— Alex Michaelides

41. “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why the answers to the present lie in the past.”

— Alex Michaelides

42. “Alicia is a silent siren, my boy, luring us to the rocks, where we dash our therapeutic ambition to pieces.”

— Alex Michaelides

43. “Maybe I’ll call it nothing. An unnamed something that I occasionally write in. I like that better. 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. I’ve never been that comfortable with words – I always think in pictures, express myself with images – so I’d never have started writing this if it weren’t for Gabriel.”

— Alex Michaelides

44. “And then, slowly, in the darkness, I realized something. I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I hadn’t lived.”

— Alex Michaelides

45. “The temple was dedicated to Demeter, goddess of the harvest – goddess of life – and to her daughter, Persephone – goddess of death. The two goddesses were often worshipped together, two sides of the same coin – mother and daughter, life and death. In Greek, Persephone was known simply as Kore, meaning “maiden.”

— Alex Michaelides

46. “I just get so stuck in my head sometimes. I feel like I’m wading through mud.”

— Alex Michaelides

47. “Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge, and cease to weep. – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI, Part 2.”

— Alex Michaelides

48. “I could feel myself thawing in the heat, softening around the edges, like a tortoise emerging into the sun after a long winter’s sleep, blinking and waking up. Kathy did that for me – she was my invitation to life, one I grasped with both hands.”

— Alex Michaelides

49. “Theo, 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.’ She was right, of course. I had.”

— Alex Michaelides

50. “Then the whipping would be over, as abruptly as it had begun. I’d be tossed to the floor, landing in a crumpled heap. A rag doll discarded by an angry toddler.”

— Alex Michaelides