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

Categorized in : Struggle Fighting Snakes

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

Shana Alexander

vanity self hair

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

Shana Alexander

love relationship life

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

cult-of-personality quality acceptance

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

Shana Alexander

hammocks rocks two

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

Shana Alexander

crush i-like-you love

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

Shana Alexander

marriage husband eye

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

Shana Alexander

rumor gossip squash

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

Shana Alexander

eye mind reality

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.

Shana Alexander

vacation holiday love

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

Shana Alexander

men watches interesting

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

Shana Alexander

ponies luxury children

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

Shana Alexander

metabolism plastic bags

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

parent kids children

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

roaming today world

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

california home people

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

people world travel

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

threatening villain evil

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

movie running life

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

wife jobs america

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

Shana Alexander

men believe enemy