Shana Alexander Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

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

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

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