Shana Alexander
The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.Collection: Truth
The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.
Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.
The mark of a true crush... is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.
Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.
When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.
The graceful Georgian streets and squares, a series of steel engravings under a wet sky.
The law changes and flows like water, and the stream of women's rights law has become a sudden rushing torrent.
I don't believe man is a woman's natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.
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.
Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts.
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.
Writing about your family is the hardest thing, unless you had the perfect happy family life, which very few of us have had.
People say to me now, 'Oh, it must have been so glamorous to grow up in hotels, eat in restaurants.' Of course, we hated it.
'60 Minutes' was a disaster for me because it made everybody think that I was the house liberal of CBS, which is the part that I was playing. It was fun for a while.
I couldn't have made it without knowing how to use laughter to get from one day to the next.
Before I ever heard about '60 Minutes,' I had been a writer, a columnist for 'Life' magazine and for 'Newsweek' - that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist.
Every time I get ready to chuck it, I remind myself that I can accomplish a lot in that little minute, and they remember what I say.
Telephone operators recognize my voice before I give my name, and say, 'Sock it to Kilpatrick.'
I have been active as a writer and journalist for nearly forty years. But the number of great reporters I have run across in that time would make, as they say, a slim book. Without question, the top man on my list would be Tommy Thompson.
In Utah, the American melting pot is unstirred. Three out of four people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful sanctuary 'behind the Zion curtain' because of religious persecution.
The Mormon belief system unites curiously American pairs of opposites. A relish for the dog-eat-dog practices of the marketplace goes hand in hand with the stern obligation to 'help thy neighbor.'
In Mormon society and culture, highest values are placed on hard work, thrift, clean living, obedience to the elders and, above all, on the importance of the family.
Mormonism is a male religion, a dream of prophets and patriarchs.
Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.
The majority of Utah's citizens do not merely approve the death penalty, they demand it - the state religion demands it.
Hair brings one’s self-image into focus; it is vanity’s proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudicesCollection: Vanity
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.Collection: Acceptance
Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.Collection: Rocks
A handwritten, personal letter has become a genuine modern-day luxury, like a child's pony ride.Collection: Children
trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.Collection: Squash
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.Collection: Struggle
The price of shallow sex may be a corresponding loss of capacity for deep love.Collection: Sex
Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Love
Good drama should sandpaper the mind.Collection: Drama
I don’t believe man is woman’s natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.Collection: Believe
Rumor and gossip, like sound itself, appear to travel by wave-effect, sheer preposterosity being no barrier.Collection: Gossip
the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.Collection: Bags
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.Collection: Marriage
At Gatling-gun tempo word-perfect the first time out. the journalistic equivalent of a high-wire front somersault without a net.Collection: Gun
Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Real
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?Collection: Sports
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.Collection: World
Natural villains are hard to come by, what with all the shrinks and social-scientist types threatening to understand everybody into the ground.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Fashion