Quotes from Shana Alexander

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

The majority of Utah's citizens do not merely approve the death penalty, they demand it - the state religion demands it.

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.

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

I couldn't have made it without knowing how to use laughter to get from one day to the next.

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

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