Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack.”

— Alex Michaelides

52. “Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing.”

— Alex Michaelides

53. “Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love – is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?’ I clenched my fist and didn’t speak. Ruth went on, hesitantly: ‘I know how.”

— Alex Michaelides

54. “The real motivation was purely selfish. I was on a quest to help myself. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health.”

— Alex Michaelides

55. “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

56. “Sometimes it takes courage, you know, and a long time, to be honest.”

— Alex Michaelides

57. “The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. – ALICE MILLER.”

— Alex Michaelides

58. “I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth. Jean-Paul Sartre.”

— Alex Michaelides

59. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone – and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness – but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.”

— Alex Michaelides

60. “Lloraba por todos nosotros. Hay demasiado dolor en todas partes, solo que cerramos los ojos para no verlo.”

— Alex Michaelides

61. “El objetivo de la terapia no es corregir el pasado, sino permitir al paciente enfrentarse a su propia historia, y llorarla.”

— Alex Michaelides

62. “My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to – and that doesn’t happen overnight.”

— Alex Michaelides

63. “Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.”

— Alex Michaelides

64. “Why? What was I guilty of – except falling in love? Was it that I loved too deeply, too needily? Too much?”

— Alex Michaelides

65. “It’s odd how quickly one adapts to the strange new world of a psychiatric unit. 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

66. “Everything which was built on lies and untruths will fall away from you.”

— Alex Michaelides

67. “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

68. “Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance. – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Winter’s Tale.”

— Alex Michaelides

69. “A pesar de todos mis esfuerzos por ser invisible, te estoy mostrando quien soy.”

— Alex Michaelides

70. “We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”

— Alex Michaelides

71. “All expensive items, but crammed together like this, they looked like junk. Taken as a representation of Barbie’s mind, it suggested a disordered inner world, to say the least. It made me think of chaos, clutter, greed – insatiable hunger.”

— Alex Michaelides

72. “Like therapy, music is about a relationship, entirely dependent on the teacher you choose.”

— Alex Michaelides

73. “That was the horror of it. We all secretly hope that tragedy will only ever happen to other people... sooner or later, it happens to you.”

— Alex Michaelides

74. “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. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another.”

— Alex Michaelides

75. “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

76. “Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources – he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety.”

— Alex Michaelides

77. “He killed me’, she said. ‘Dad just killed me.”

— Alex Michaelides

78. “I would, however, occasionally look up at Ruth’s face. And to my surprise, tears would be collected in her eyes as she listened. This may seem hard to grasp, but those tears were not hers. They were mine.”

— Alex Michaelides

79. “If people don’t reply when you speak to them and never initiate conversation, you soon forget they’re there. Alicia had quickly melted into the background, becoming invisible.”

— Alex Michaelides

80. “If people don’t reply when you speak to them and never initiate conversation, you soon forget they’re there.”

— Alex Michaelides

81. “Paintings, mirrors, and framed photographs were crammed together on the walls; little statues, vases, and other objets d’art competed for space on tables and dressers. All expensive items, but crammed together like this, they looked like junk. Taken as a representation of Barbie’s mind, it suggested a disordered inner world, to say the least. It made me think of chaos, clutter, greed – insatiable hunger. I wondered what her childhood had been like.”

— Alex Michaelides

82. “I didn’t want to die. Not yet; when I hadn’t lived.”

— Alex Michaelides

83. “The real motivation was purely selfish. I was on a quest to help myself. 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

84. “We were crashing through every last boundary between therapist and patient. And soon it would be impossible to tell who was who.”

— Alex Michaelides

85. “For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the homeless man. Apart from pity, there was another feeling, unnameable somehow – a kind of fear. I pictured him as a baby in his mother’s arms. Did she ever imagine her baby would end up crazy, dirty and stinking, huddled on the pavement, muttering obscenities?”

— Alex Michaelides

86. “Unexpressed emotions will never die.”

— Alex Michaelides

87. “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. I’m terrified of myself – and of my mother in me. Is her madness in my blood? Is it?”

— Alex Michaelides

88. “The dead don’t talk.”

— Alex Michaelides

89. “Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid; anxious. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me.”

— Alex Michaelides

90. “It’s sadness you’ve been carrying around for many years. You know, 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.”

— Alex Michaelides

91. “On some level, they became each other – they joined, like mercury.”

— Alex Michaelides

92. “You can’t help me, her eyes shouted. Look at you, you can barely help yourself. You pretend to know so much and be so wise, but you should be sitting here instead of me. Freak. Fraud. Liar. Liar –.”

— Alex Michaelides

93. “Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia – and we call depression.”

— Alex Michaelides

94. “It reminds me what sheltered lives we live here in the cloister – naive, perhaps even willfully ignorant of the horrors of the outside world.” Privately, Mariana agreed. Reading about life was no preparation for living it; she had learned this the hard way. But she didn’t say so. She just nodded. “Such violence is horrifying. It’s hard for anyone to comprehend.”

— Alex Michaelides

95. “I felt safe, suddenly. I felt calm, and at peace – as if a raging fever had abated, a delirium burned itself out. I felt the other part of me, the good part, rising with the dawn...”

— Alex Michaelides

96. “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

97. “No one is born evil.”

— Alex Michaelides

98. “When I’m around other people, even if it’s only the bored waitress in here, I feel connected to the world somehow, like a human being. Otherwise I’m in danger of ceasing to exist. Like I might disappear.”

— Alex Michaelides

99. “Yeah. And Alicia whispered something to me – I’ll never forget it. ‘He killed me,’ she said. ‘Dad just – killed me.’” I stared at Paul, speechless. A chorus of bells started ringing in my head, clanging, chiming, reverberating. This was what I’d been looking for. I’d found it, the missing piece of the jigsaw, at last – here on a roof in Cambridge.”

— Alex Michaelides

100. “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