Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. – SIGMUND FREUD.”

— Alex Michaelides

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

61. “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

62. “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

63. “We like to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial fog with our characters fully formed, like Aphrodite rising perfect from the sea foam.”

— Alex Michaelides

64. “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

65. “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?”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

72. “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

73. “A man never abandons a woman like that. Not if he loves her.”

— Alex Michaelides

74. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

76. “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

77. “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

78. “He would have stuck by her-I knew that for a fact. A man never abandons a women like that. Not if he loves her.”

— Alex Michaelides

79. “Most people aren’t alive, you know, not really – sleepwalking their way through life.”

— Alex Michaelides

80. “Debo abrir los ojos y mirar, y ser consciente de la vida tal como ocurre, no solo como yo quiero que sea.”

— Alex Michaelides

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “As a therapist, she knew 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

85. “Therapy isn’t just about talking,” Indira said. “It’s about providing a safe space – a containing environment. Most communication is nonverbal, as I’m sure you know.”

— Alex Michaelides

86. “Her silence was like a mirror – reflecting yourself back at you.”

— Alex Michaelides

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “So this was it. This was how it was going to end. Alicia was silent again, and this time her silence would last forever.”

— Alex Michaelides

92. “Once you kill another human being, there’s no going back.”

— Alex Michaelides

93. “It was an odd feeling, a bit like recognizing someone – someone she had once known intimately, and couldn’t quite place where or when they had lost touch. The young man ignored the jeering calls of his friends. And with a curious, widening smile, he made his way over to her. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Sebastian.” And that was it. “It was written” is the Greek expression. Meaning, quite simply, from that moment on, their destinies were sealed.”

— Alex Michaelides

94. “I know now that when I have an agenda for a picture, a predetermined idea how it should turn out, it never works. It remains stillborn, lifeless. But if I’m really paying attention, really aware, I sometimes hear a whispering voice pointing me in the right direction. And if I give in to it, as an act of faith, it leads me somewhere unexpected, not where I intended, but somewhere intensely alive, glorious – and the result is independent of me, with a life force of its own.”

— Alex Michaelides

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

99. “Unexpressed emotions will never die.”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides