Quotes from Alice Hoffman

When you change your name you change your fate as well.

Margaret thought of all she knew for certain, that day would always follow night that love was never wasted nor was it lost.

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.

There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

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.

Was it fate?" she asked. "Do we care?" he answered.

Men will be men, Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. Don't complain, she advised. That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.

That was the way illness appeared in a house, in the corners, in between floorboards, on the hooks in the closet, along with the sweaters and coats.

For some, witchery was a choice, but not for them.

Some people know the exact moment when they've lost everything. They can look back and see it plain as day and for the life of them they can't understand why they didn't spot the situation as it was happening.

Only her death could prove her innocence; a circle of impossible, deathly judgement.

I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

Everything seemed slow, molasses slow, lovesick slow.

Choose courage over caution. Take time to visit libraries. Look for light in the darkness. Have faith in yourself. Know that love is what matters

I read Greek myths. I read about far off places, Venice and Paris. I read about men who searched for things they could not find at home, and women who fell in love with the wrong person and waited for the arrival of their beloved for so long that a year was no different from a single day. The same thing was happening to me. Years were passing. I was already a woman, and I still wasn't done reading.

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.

Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

Seeing has little to do with opening your eyes; it's what you feel inside that counts, it's what you know without anyone telling you.

If she wanted to enter an otherworld, all she had to do was open a novel.

That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls.

I knew that my brother would still be a part of this world no matter what happened next. I felt my love for him so deeply that my blood seemed to flow down the street to him. My blood sang out my prayer for Luis even while he was still living in our world.

Love is ancient and mysterious and you can't mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster.

Know what you want, and be sure of it, for regret gives birth to more regret and nothing more.

Do you ever get the feeling that your life isn't really your own, and you've just sort of let things happen to you?