Alex Michaelides Quotes

“Although she didn't know it at the time, she was already so deeply in love, there was no way out again. On some level, they became each other--they joined, like mercury.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“before memory. 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. But thanks to increasing research into the development of the brain, we know this is not the case. We are born with a brain half-formed—more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents.
This is frightening, for obvious reasons. 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. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“...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 dol that was coming apart at the seams. If only she could box up her love, as she was attempting to do with his possessions.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens