Shana Alexander Quotes

Hair brings one’s self-image into focus; it is vanity’s proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

In a nation of celebrity worshipers, amid followers of the cult of personality, individual modesty becomes a heroic quality. I find heroism in the acceptance of anonymity, in the studied resistance to the normal American tropism toward the limelight.

Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.

trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.

The mark of a true crush... is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.

A handwritten, personal letter has become a genuine modern-day luxury, like a child's pony ride.

I reserve my greatest admiration for those who continue to struggle to embrace the whole impossible tangle of snakes that is our society; those who fight to identify and strengthen human connections, and defeat polarizing forces that strain to drive us apart.

The paradox of Reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

The price of shallow sex may be a corresponding loss of capacity for deep love.

I don’t believe man is woman’s natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west.

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.

When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.

Ours is the first society in history in which parents expect to learn from their children, rather than the other way around. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, we are an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids.

This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

Rumor and gossip, like sound itself, appear to travel by wave-effect, sheer preposterosity being no barrier.

Ours was the Togetherness Generation. We equated togetherness with salvation, and expected so much from it that it was bound to let us down. Companionship, security, lifelong physical and spiritual and emotional warmth - all were to be had for the twist of a ring and the breathing of a vow. And to be had no other way.

At Gatling-gun tempo word-perfect the first time out. the journalistic equivalent of a high-wire front somersault without a net.

Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start.