Shana Alexander Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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
Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

Shana Alexander
Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander
Mind and body are not to be taken lightly. Their connection is intimate and mysterious, and better mapped by poets than pornographers.

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

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander
How is the newcomer to deal with Rome? What is one to make of this marble rubble, this milk of wolves, this blood of Caesars, this sunrise of Renaissance, this baroquery of blown stone, this warm hive of Italians, this antipasto of civilization?

Shana Alexander
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.

Shana Alexander
The law changes and flows like water, and... the stream of women's rights law has become a sudden rushing torrent.

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

Shana Alexander
Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.

Shana Alexander
Huge herds of vigorous, curious, open-eyed Americans freely roaming the world are, it seems to me, quite possibly a vital national resource today as at no other time in our history.

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

Shana Alexander