Top 250 Alex Michaelides Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown.”

— Alex Michaelides

152. “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

153. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. – C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed 1 A.”

— Alex Michaelides

154. “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

155. “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

156. “She sat perfectly still, her spine rigid and straight. She looked like a cellist. Or a soldier.”

— Alex Michaelides

157. “No matter how far I ran, I carried him with me wherever I went. I was pursued by an infernal, relentless chorus of furies, all with his voice – shrieking that I was worthless, shameful, a failure.”

— Alex Michaelides

158. “The truth is, I have many complicated feelings around going home, and being at the house, with Lydia and Paul. So I avoid going back – and I end up feeling guilty, so I can’t win either way.”

— Alex Michaelides

159. “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

160. “Her eyes opened. It was as if the light had been switched on inside them. They were the eyes of a child, wide and innocent, free of scorn or suspicion. Color seemed to come into her face. Suddenly she seemed wonderfully alive.”

— Alex Michaelides

161. “Boundaries, by definition, are the first thing to go when a child is abused.”

— Alex Michaelides

162. “Life was a circle too, wasn’t it? – from birth to death.”

— Alex Michaelides

163. “As you will see, it’s an incredible story – of that there is no doubt. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.”

— Alex Michaelides

164. “It was a strange, timeless moment – that first moment they saw each other. Time seemed to slow down, flatten, and stretch. Mariana was transfixed, held in his gaze, unable to look away. 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.”

— Alex Michaelides

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

— Alex Michaelides

166. “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

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

— Alex Michaelides

168. “My argument with so much of psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. – ARTHUR MILLER.”

— Alex Michaelides

169. “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me. Job 9:20.”

— Alex Michaelides

170. “We are drawn to this particular 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

171. “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

172. “I saw it now. I would never be safe. Never be loved. All my hopes, dashed-all my dreams, shattered-leaving nothing, nothing. My father was right-I didn’t deserve to live. I was-nothing.”

— Alex Michaelides

173. “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

174. “I tore off a sheet of paper from a pad, and reached for my pen. An old habit, formed at university – something about the process of putting pen to paper helps me organize my mind. I’ve always had difficulty formulating an opinion until I’ve written it down.”

— Alex Michaelides

175. “She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved.”

— Alex Michaelides

176. “It’s not about the coffee cup,” said Mariana. “It’s about boundaries, the boundaries of this group, the rules we abide by here. We’ve spoken about this before. We can’t take part in therapy if we feel unsafe. Boundaries make us feel safe. Boundaries are what therapy is about.”

— Alex Michaelides

177. “Reading about life was no preparation for living it.”

— Alex Michaelides

178. “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

179. “Love isn’t conditional, It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone- and always failing. You can love someone if you’re afraid of them.”

— Alex Michaelides

180. “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

181. “It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”

— Alex Michaelides

182. “Whatever marijuana did for me was still working, Ruth argued – until the day it would outlive its usefulness, when I would probably relinquish it with ease.”

— Alex Michaelides

183. “I bought an electric fan yesterday. I set it up at the foot of the bed on top of the chest, and Gabriel immediately started complaining. ‘It makes too much noise. We’ll never sleep.”

— Alex Michaelides

184. “But one day, all the hurt and anger would burst forth, like fire from a dragon’s belly – and you’d pick up a gun.”

— Alex Michaelides

185. “I feel better already – writing this down is providing a kind of release, an outlet, a space to express myself. A bit like therapy, I suppose.”

— Alex Michaelides

186. “There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it.”

— Alex Michaelides

187. “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. – SIGMUND FREUD, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.”

— Alex Michaelides

188. “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

189. “Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life.”

— Alex Michaelides

190. “He’s inside the house.”

— Alex Michaelides

191. “There is no such thing as a baby.”

— Alex Michaelides

192. “Perhaps. But let us not forget that while Alicia Berenson may be a murderer, she was also an artist. It makes perfect sense – to me at least – that she should pick up her brushes and paints and express her complicated emotions on canvas. No wonder that, for once, painting came to her with such ease; if grief can be called easy. The painting was a self-portrait. She titled it in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, in light blue Greek lettering. One word: Alcestis.”

— Alex Michaelides

193. “If you’re not aware of the transcendent, if you’re not awake to the glorious mystery of life and death that you’re lucky enough to be part of, if that doesn’t fill you with joy and strike you with awe, you might as well not be alive.”

— Alex Michaelides

194. “The painting was a self-portrait. She titled it in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, in light blue Greek lettering. One word: Alcestis.”

— Alex Michaelides

195. “Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”

— Alex Michaelides

196. “We swore never to lie to each other. Never pretend. Always be truthful.”

— Alex Michaelides

197. “She felt alert, somehow – perhaps awake was a better word: everything seemed clearer, as if a fog had lifted; colors were sharper, the edges of things more defined. The world no longer felt muted and gray and far away – behind a veil. It felt alive again, and vivid, and full of color, wet with autumn rain; and vibrating with the eternal hum of endless birth and death.”

— Alex Michaelides

198. “Alcestis. Have you read it? By Euripides.” He gave me a curious look. “Read it. Then you’ll understand.”

— Alex Michaelides

199. “Through these stories, Mariana fell in love with a vision of England and Englishness – an England that had quite possibly never existed beyond the pages of these books: an England of warm summer rain, and wet greenery, and apple blossom; winding rivers and willow trees, and country pubs with roaring fires. The England of the Famous Five, and Peter Pan and Wendy; King Arthur and Camelot; Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen, Shakespeare – and Tennyson.”

— Alex Michaelides

200. “Alicia was silent again, and this time her silence would last forever.”

— Alex Michaelides