Quotes from Alice Hoffman

What you wind up regretting aren't the things you do, it's what you don't do that you will never forgive yourself for.

She truly believed that she carried her own fate in the palm of her hand, as if destiny was nothing more than a green marble or a robin's egg, a trinket any silly girl could scoop up and keep. She believed that all you wanted, you would eventually receive, and that fate was a force which worked with you, not against you.

But can you measure someone's love? I want to know. You think you can measure love? She's kind not to laugh at me...No scale would be strong enough, she tells me. It would break to pieces under the weight.

At first it appeared as if something with wings had fallen from above... perhaps an angel who had faltered then drowned, in tears of this poor tired world.

My grandmother was overwhelmed by what was happening to us. She ahd moved back into the past because the here and the now was too terrible.

Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with propriety, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect (…)

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

Life is beautiful, just very unfair.

It was easy to lie to people who still believed in the truth.

He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul.

They believed all books should be read, for as long as the reader liked.

No one knows where time goes, all the same it disappears.

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

Men are men, with all their flaws, as we have ours, that's true, but the best among them manage to discover who we really are.

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.

My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

Talent is something you're born with. It's a gift and a curse, and it's often cause for jealousy from those who are without it.

But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don't amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most

a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need.

Oh, you're moonlight, he'd said. Harder to see, but there for those who look.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Butter melting on a dish meant someone nearby was in love, and a bird in the house take your bad luck out the window.

Men and women rarely speak to each other, though they often talk.

She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.