Alex Michaelides

"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."

"Reading about life was no preparation for living it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

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