Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Listen, and you'll hear a story being told, one you may need to know.

Rules of Magic: Do as you will, but harm no one. What you give will be returned to you threefold. Fall in love whenever you can. Meaning of Abracadabra - I create what I speak

He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky.

Then let us be among those who hope that the future will be less cruel than the past.

In my family, a book can be a life raft.

There was the blue sky above her and all those many roses, the ones that gave off the scent of cloves in the rain and the ones that left a trace of lemon on your fingers, the ones that were the color of blood, and those that were as white as clouds. Each one was sweeter than the next and as red as gemstones.

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

I think of life as a book of stories. You move through the stories and the characters change. But once you have a name on your skin you are stuck with one story, even if it's a bad one.

My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.

the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.

It was true, when you saved someone, they belonged to you in some small way, but it was also true that you belonged to them. They would stay with you and enter into your dreams and your thoughts, as you would enter into theirs.

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.

If you do not face something, it will follow you anyway.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

The river runs every shade of blue that has ever been known to humankind: ink and turquoise and lapis, indigo, teal, cerulean, and ultramarine.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep, those haunted by one thing or another: love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.

she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell.

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.

I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.

Never watch another woman burn

That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

Do what you want, do what you will, do what you have to, do what you think you cannot.