Alex Michaelides Quotes

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

It wasn’t a question of forgiveness. That wasn’t something Mariana could decide on, anyway. Ruth always said that forgiveness could not be coerced—it was experienced spontaneously, as an act of.

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

A monster with a knife was among them, unseen, prowling the streets, apparently able to strike and then melt away invisibly into the darkness … His invisibility made him into something more than human, something supernatural: a creature born from myth, a phantom.

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.

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

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.

Possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering.

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.