Shana Alexander Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

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.

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. 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.

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

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

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.