Alice Hoffman Quotes

Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you're not careful. They can eat you alive.

~ Alice Hoffman

In my memories I have set my life in Brooklyn between pieces of glass, separate from my current existence, and this has enabled me to move forward. The past cannot tie me in knots, nor can it cause me to drown. And yet what is stored in glass belongs to me still. Each piece is a part of me: the hummingbirds, the locked doors, Mr. Morris in the yard, the pear tree, the woman covered by bees, and you. Especially you.

~ Alice Hoffman

Although she'd never believe it, those lines in Gillian's face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she's gone through and what she's survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.

~ Alice Hoffman

You want me to lie to you? said McKay. I shrugged. Why not? I didn't mind lies.

~ Alice Hoffman

Once I knew nothing about McKay and now I knew everything about him. This seemed as good as any reason for not walking out the door. There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names.

~ Alice Hoffman

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

~ Alice Hoffman

The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.

~ Alice Hoffman

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

~ Alice Hoffman

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

~ Alice Hoffman

I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.

~ Alice Hoffman

But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.

~ Alice Hoffman

In a novel, you'll find yourself in a world of possibilities. You'll find shelter there.

~ Alice Hoffman

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.

~ Alice Hoffman

You want to know what love is? Its the thing that ruins you.

~ Alice Hoffman

There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight.

~ Alice Hoffman

I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

~ Alice Hoffman

She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she'll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom.

~ Alice Hoffman

Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can't even see. It's there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.

~ Alice Hoffman

Time wasn't the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they'd been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.

~ Alice Hoffman

The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.

~ Alice Hoffman

Such was the case with most unhappy students; they avoided even one another, so intent on their own unhappiness they failed to notice the other lost souls around them.

~ Alice Hoffman

It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him.

~ Alice Hoffman

I only have one story now.The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being.

~ Alice Hoffman

Revenge did that to a person, it caused even the insecure and the meek to take foolhardy chances. After a while it became a way of life, the risks felt as natural as drawing a breath.

~ Alice Hoffman

She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you're bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you're sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows you're there.

~ Alice Hoffman

It had made her too helpless, because that's what love did. There was no way around it and no way to fight it. Now if she lost, she lost everything.

~ Alice Hoffman

You should never trust a liar so you should never trust a man of honor. Those two are the worst of mankind.

~ Alice Hoffman

She understood love. What destroys you saves you, she had told me.

~ Alice Hoffman

Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.

~ Alice Hoffman

Sam said, Hey, you want to get high? Amy had taken his words to mean You are so beautiful I am undone by you.

~ Alice Hoffman

They say that dogs may dream, and when Topsy was old, his feet would move in his sleep. With his eyes closed he would often make a noise that sounded quite human, as if greeting someone in his dreams. At first it seemed that he believed Sara would return, but as the years went by I understood that his loyalty asked for no reward, and that love comes in unexpected forms. His wish was small, as hers had been -- merely to be beside her. As for me, I already knew I would never get what I wanted.

~ Alice Hoffman

I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.

~ Alice Hoffman

I knew the power of a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world.

~ Alice Hoffman

What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive.

~ Alice Hoffman

Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own.

~ Alice Hoffman

Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

~ Alice Hoffman

I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.

~ Alice Hoffman

Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done.

~ Alice Hoffman

As for Gus, he had come to Haddan with no appreciation for the human race and no expectations of his fellow man. He was full ready to confront contempt; he'd been beleaguered and insulted often enough to have learned to ignore anything with a heartbeat. Still, every once in a while he made an exception, as he did with Carlin Leander. He appreciated everything about Carlin and lived for the hour when they left their books and sneaked off to the graveyard. Not even the crow nesting in the elm tree could dissuade him from his mission, for when he was beside Carlin, Gus acquired a strange optimism; in the light of her radiance the rest of the world began to shine. For a brief time, bad faith and human weakness could be forgotten or, at the very least, temporarily ignored. When it came time to go back to their rooms, Gus followed on the path, holding on to each moment, trying his best to stretch out time. Standing in the shadows of the rose arbor in order to watch Carlin climb back up the fire escape at St. Anne's, his heart ached. He could tell he was going to be devastated, and yet he was already powerless. Carlin always turned and waved before she stepped through her window and Gus Pierce always waved back, like a common fool, an idiot of a boy who would have done anything to please her.

~ Alice Hoffman

In good time every secret must be shared and every miracle called into question.

~ Alice Hoffman