Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

103. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

105. “No one is born evil.”

— Alex Michaelides

106. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

— Alex Michaelides

107. “I need to get out of here. I need to escape. Oh my God – I can hear him – He’s inside. He’s inside the house.”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

110. “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

111. “Sit down, then. But don’t talk. I’m working on the face.”

— Alex Michaelides

112. “I went to meet Kathy at the National Theatre cafe on the South Bank, where the performers would often congregate after rehearsal. She was sitting at the back of the cafe with a couple of fellow actresses, deep in conversation. They looked up at me as I approached.”

— Alex Michaelides

113. “What better way for me to prove that my father was correct – that I’m worthless and unlovable – than by pursuing someone who will never love me?”

— Alex Michaelides

114. “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

115. “Lo quiero de una forma tan completa, tan absoluta, que a veces ese sentimiento amenaza con superarme.”

— Alex Michaelides

116. “I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown.”

— Alex Michaelides

117. “Psychopathy or sadism never appeared from nowhere. It was not a virus, infecting someone out of the blue. It had a long prehistory in childhood.”

— Alex Michaelides

118. “We need to be brave enough to sit with the madness, to hold it – instead of trying to lock it up.”

— Alex Michaelides

119. “As far as I can see, love only brings sorrow.”

— Alex Michaelides

120. “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

121. “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.”

— Alex Michaelides

122. “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

123. “Until death do us part.”

— Alex Michaelides

124. “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

125. “Without wishing to sound boastful, I felt uniquely qualified to help Alicia Berenson. I’m a forensic psychotherapist and used to working with some of the most damaged, vulnerable members of society. And something about Alicia’s story resonated with me personally – I felt a profound empathy with her right from the start. Unfortunately, I was still working at Broadmoor in those days, and so treating Alicia would have – should have – remained an idle fantasy, had not fate unexpectedly intervened.”

— Alex Michaelides

126. “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

127. “I remember the advice Ruth gave me when Kathy and I first got together: “Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. 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

128. “Psychotherapy had quite literally saved my life. More important, it had transformed the quality of that life. The talking cure was central to who I became – in a profound sense, it defined me.”

— Alex Michaelides

129. “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

130. “I think her behavior suggests she is quite damaged – lacking in empathy and integrity and just plain kindness – all the qualities you brim with.”

— Alex Michaelides

131. “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

132. “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

133. “One can’t help but wonder what their relationship will be like in the future, Alcestis and Admetus. Trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”

— Alex Michaelides

134. “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

135. “I was a little taken aback, and immediately alert. ‘What do you mean, watching?’ ‘Just what I said. Watching. I told the police, but they didn’t seem interested. They made up their minds the moment they found Alicia with Gabriel’s body and the gun. They didn’t want to listen to any other story.’ ‘What story – exactly?’ ‘I’ll tell you. And you’ll see why I wanted you to come.”

— Alex Michaelides

136. “It’s been here the whole time – my past, I mean – and the reason it’s catching up with me is because it never went anywhere.”

— Alex Michaelides

137. “The person you love most in the world, has condemned you to die, through their own cowardice. That’s quite a betrayal.”

— Alex Michaelides

138. “My only hope of survival, I realised, was to retreat – physically as well as psychically.”

— Alex Michaelides

139. “We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally – by the colour of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk – just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself.”

— Alex Michaelides

140. “Alicia’s body. But where Jean-Felix saw beauty, I saw only pain; I saw self-inflicted wounds, and scars of self-harm. ‘Did she ever talk to.”

— Alex Michaelides

141. “God hadn’t abandoned me during my childhood, when I had felt so alone and so scared – He had been keeping Kathy hidden up His sleeve, waiting to produce her, like a deft magician.”

— Alex Michaelides

142. “In order to be a good therapist, you must be receptive to your patients’ feelings – but you must not hold on to them – they are not yours – they do not belong to you.”

— Alex Michaelides

143. “Mariana’s mind went back to that poor girl, murdered by the marsh – whoever she was. Even if she wasn’t Zoe’s friend Tara, she was someone’s friend, someone’s daughter. That was the horror of it. 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

144. “You’ve come too far and worked too hard to return to a life of dishonesty and denial and emotional abuse.”

— Alex Michaelides

145. “Snow is a very powerful imaginative symbol, don’t you think? Wipes everything clean.”

— Alex Michaelides

146. “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, and that required a special kind of listening.”

— Alex Michaelides

147. “Kathy and I were happy before; we could be again.”

— Alex Michaelides

148. “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

149. “Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve.”

— Alex Michaelides

150. “But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us – if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? 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.”

— Alex Michaelides