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Alex Michaelides Quotes
born 1977
Alex Michaelides ( born 1977) is a bestselling British Cypriot author and screenwriter. His debut novel, the psychological thriller The Silent Patient, is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, with over 6.5 million copies sold.
Random Alex Michaelides quote
16 quotes
Possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them.
As far as I can see, love only brings sorrow.
She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved.
Reading about life was no preparation for living it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She was still in love and didn’t know what to do with all this love of hers. There was so much of it, and it was so messy: leaking, spilling, tumbling out of her, like stuffing falling out of an old rag doll that was coming apart at the seams.
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