Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

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

— Alex Michaelides

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own.”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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. “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

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

— 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. “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

85. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

97. “Unexpressed emotions will never die.”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

99. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides