Shana Alexander Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of you begins yearning not for a mortal doctor but for a medicine man.

Shana Alexander
Natural villains are hard to come by, what with all the shrinks and social-scientist types threatening to understand everybody into the ground.

Shana Alexander
Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.

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

Shana Alexander
Rome's riches are in too immediate juxtaposition. Under the lid of awful August heat, one moves dizzily from church to palace to fountain to ruin, a single fly at a banquet, not knowing where to light.

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

Shana Alexander
She will not be interrupted. Break into her train of thought, and she simply starts over. From the top. It is like trying to hold a conversation with a cassette.

Shana Alexander
We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.

Shana Alexander
The real weakness of all porn, it seems to me, is its necessary repetition... the pornographer must continually invent new sauces for old meats.

Shana Alexander
We are on a sexual binge in this country.... One consequence of this binge is that while people now get into bed more readily and a lot more naturally than they once did, what happens there often seems less important.

Shana Alexander
Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.

Shana Alexander
The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

Shana Alexander
California is once-and-future America, and much that is newest and biggest in this country, both its best and worst, is concentrated along our western edge.

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

Shana Alexander
The mark of a true crush (whether the object is man, woman or city) is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.

Shana Alexander
Rumor and gossip, like sound itself, appear to travel by wave-effect, sheer preposterosity being no barrier, and once the first stone, or word, is cast, it is already beyond recall.

Shana Alexander
What is liveliest in America, most energetic, most dissatisfied with things-as-they-are, more ardent for things-as-they-might be has always tended to pile up along our Pacific shore.

Shana Alexander
Hair is sexy. Hair brings one's self-image into focus; it is vanity's proving ground.

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

Shana Alexander
Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.

Shana Alexander
Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts...

Shana Alexander
The rich plankton of pop heroes and pop villains on which we Americans are accustomed to feed, the daily media soup of sports figures, ax murderers, politicians, and rock singers, the ever-running river of celebs, heavies, and oddballs that we use to spice up our own relatively humdrum lives has of late become a very watery gruel. Where have all the good guys and bad guys gone? Why does everyone out there look so gray?

Shana Alexander
The real trouble with the doctor image in America is that it has been grayed by the image of the doctor-as-businessman, the doctor-as-bureaucrat, the doctor-as-medical-robot, and the doctor-as-terrified-victim-of-malpractice-suits.

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

Shana Alexander
A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There.

Shana Alexander
The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.

Shana Alexander
Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue, and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it. A well-known backstage anecdote concerns the occasion when the prima ballerina found ground glass in her toe slipper — and every other dancer in the Company was equally suspect.

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander
As a general rule, fans and idols should always be kept at arm's length, the length of the arm to be proportionate to the degree of sheer idolatry involved. Don't take a Beatle to lunch. Don't wait up to see if the Easter Bunny is real. Just enjoy the egg hunt.

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander