Alice Hoffman Quotes

They weren't true stories, they were better than that.

~ Alice Hoffman

She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless.

~ Alice Hoffman

Every man engaged in war tells himself he can alter what has been written, that it is he, not God, who is the maker of destiny, free to change what is meant to be.

~ Alice Hoffman

...never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own.

~ Alice Hoffman

Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.

~ Alice Hoffman

I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.

~ Alice Hoffman

... the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.

~ Alice Hoffman

... a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.

~ Alice Hoffman

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

~ Alice Hoffman

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

~ Alice Hoffman

Shut up and do not think. All the theorists agree: shut up and keep the words from being said. And all of the scars will remain invisible, and all of the scars will remain under the skin. Where they belong.

~ Alice Hoffman

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

~ Alice Hoffman

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.

~ Alice Hoffman

But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

~ Alice Hoffman

When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn't recognize her friend. Juliet hadn't bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.

~ Alice Hoffman

The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.

~ Alice Hoffman

That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.

~ Alice Hoffman

She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe.

~ Alice Hoffman

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

~ Alice Hoffman

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

~ Alice Hoffman

Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn't have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.

~ Alice Hoffman

Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

~ Alice Hoffman

I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

~ Alice Hoffman

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

~ Alice Hoffman

He had appeared beside her because she had wanted him to. She had called him to her, and was calling him still. Even when she fell asleep, she dreamed of water, as if the world were topsy-turvy and everything she cared about had been lost in the deep. She plunged through the green waves with her eyes wide open, searching for the world as she'd known it, but that world no longer existed; everything that had once been solid was liquid now, and the birds swam alongside the fish.

~ Alice Hoffman

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.

~ Alice Hoffman

...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.

~ Alice Hoffman

Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.

~ Alice Hoffman

She’d bought a blue notebook in the pharmacy to write down her aunt’s remedies. Star tulip to understand dreams, bee balm for a restful sleep, black mustard seed to repel nightmares, remedies that used essential oils of almond or apricot or myrrh from thorn trees in the desert. Two eggs, which must never be eaten, set under a bed to clean a tainted atmosphere. Vinegar as a cleansing bath. Garlic, salt, and rosemary, the ancient spell to cast away evil.

~ Alice Hoffman

Blue must be worn for protection. Moonstones were useful in connecting with the living, topaz to contact the dead. Copper, sacred to Venus, will call a man to you, and black tourmaline will eliminate jealousy. When it came to love, you must always be careful. If you dropped something belonging to the man you loved into a candle flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, he would arrive on your doorstep by morning, so you would do well to be certain you wanted him there. The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove. It had always cost $9.99 and was therefore called Love Potion Number Nine, which worked best on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month.

~ Alice Hoffman

The most glorious hour in Manhattan was when twilight fell in sheets across the Great Lawn. Bands of blue turned darker by the moment as the last of the pale light filtered through the boughs of cherry trees and black locusts. In October, the meadows turned gold; the vines were twists of yellow and red.

~ Alice Hoffman

We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us.

~ Alice Hoffman

Someone killed himself because of me once, Meredith said.People kill themselves because of what's inside of them, not because of other people.

~ Alice Hoffman

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

~ Alice Hoffman

what was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.

~ Alice Hoffman

He knew even at an early age of seven, how dangerous it was for someone like him to have hope. He knows how to have no expectations. He can completely control not just what he wants, but what he needs

~ Alice Hoffman

What was desire anyway, when examined in the clear light of day? Was it the way a woman searched for her clothes in the morning, or the manner in which a man might watch her sit before the mirror and comb her hair? Was it a pale November dawn, when ice formed on windowpanes and crows called from the bare black trees? Or was it the way a person might yield to the night, setting forth on a path so unexpected that daylight would never again be completely clear?

~ Alice Hoffman

Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.

~ Alice Hoffman

I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards.

~ Alice Hoffman

I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.

~ Alice Hoffman