The Maidens Quotes

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Reading about life was no preparation for living it.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them,”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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. That’s the message of the tragedies. Participate in the wonder. For your sake (...) -live it.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Once you kill another human being there is no going back… it’s a bit like being reborn, I suppose. But no ordinary birth—it’s a metamorphosis. What emerges from the ashes is not a phoenix, but an uglier creature: deformed, incapable of flight, a predator using its claws to cut and rip.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man: a melting pot of gratitude, fear, expectation, and dutiful obedience that has nothing to do with love in the true sense of the word. You don’t love him. Nor do you know or love yourself.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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.
Except Mariana knew he wasn’t a phantom, or a monster. He was just a man, and he didn’t merit being mythologized; he didn’t deserve it.
He deserved only—if she could summon it in her heart—pity and fear. The very qualities, according to Aristotle, that constituted catharsis in tragedy.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“Mariana no longer saw the world in color. Life was muted and gray and far away, behind a veil—behind a mist of sadness.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“It doesn’t take much to save a childhood.” A little kindness, some understanding or validation: someone to recognize and acknowledge a child’s reality—and save his sanity.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“The most intelligent minds are often female… is that so hard to accept?”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Once you kill another human being, there’s no going back.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“I also learned, from a young age, that I did not walk on the ground—but on a narrow network of invisible ropes, suspended above the earth. I had to navigate them carefully, trying not to slip or fall. Certain aspects of my personality were offensive, it seemed. I had terrible secrets to hide—even I didn’t know what they were. My”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“What a luxury that would be—to forgive. But I never got that chance.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. —ARTHUR MILLER”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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, The Maidens

“The temple was dedicated to Demeter, goddess of the harvest—goddess of life—and to her daughter, Persephone—goddess of death. The two goddesses were often worshipped together, two sides of the same coin—mother and daughter, life and death. In Greek, Persephone was known simply as Kore, meaning “maiden.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“A long time ago, psychopathy used to be called simply ‘evil’. People who were evil – who took a delight in hurting or killing others – were written about ever since Medea took an axe to her children, and probably long before that. The word ‘psychopath’ was coined by a German psychiatrist in 1888 […] from the German word psychopastiche, literally meaning ‘suffering soul’. For Mariana this was the clue – the suffering – the sense that these monsters were also in pain. […] 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. […] Yet many children grow up in terribly abusive environments – and they don’t end up as murderers. Why? Well, as Mariana’s old supervisor used to say, ‘It doesn’t take much to save a childhood.’ A little kindness, some understanding or validation: someone to recognise and acknowledge a child’s reality – and save his sanity.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“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”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens