Quotes from 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.

truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

Whoever gives his true self away does do with words

All of the quarters in his hand were tarnished. He had no idea that the silver in a man's pockets always turns black if he kisses a witch.

Mean people are meaningless.

I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass.

How lucky they'd been to be raised by women who taught them what was most important in this world. Read as many books as you can. 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 most.

I was making a different sort of heart, one that was black, one that was protected by thorns, by bats, by raven's wings, by sorrow, by my aloneness, my armour

There's a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself.

Some people can't be warned away from disaster, you can try, you can put up every alert, but they'll still go their own way.

Love was never a mistake, even when it wasn't returned.

I didn't understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her. It gave me my strength, but it gave me my weakness as well.

If this was what angels observed when they gazed upon our world, how we might murder each other and cause one another agony, then I pitied them as I pitied no others.

Love is complicated, love can be hidden, love, above all else, is loyalty.

Her gift with wild birds allowed her to bring them to her merely by lifting her hand. From a distance, when she ran so fast she was nearly flying, it seemed as if she spoke their language, and was meant for their world more than her own.

Once upon a time I was young and beautiful. But that is the fairy tale, because it all passes in the blink of an eye.

You don't forget the people you love, she told him. That's what I've realized. They just get farther away. Like a spyglass turned around. Annie to Pete

You can only know a friend so well after all. When you come right down to it, even your best friend is a puzzle.

But chains made out of blood and memory were a thousand times more difficult to sever than those made of steel, and the past could overtake a person if she wasn't careful

A fortuneteller at a magicians' convention in Atlantic City once told him that when he fell in love it would be forever, and he laughed at the notion, but now he sees that reading was completely on target.

a place where people heard what she said but not what she meant. She wanted to be known, but no one knew her.

The craft was dangerous and unpredictable, and witches were difficult to control, for they had minds of their own and didn't hold to keeping to the law.

He backed off, the way he always does, but it won't happen a second time. If he ever sees her again he's going to go right up to her and ask her to marry him, that's what he'll do. He's sick of letting fate roll right past him.

Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and the choices one will have to make are a burden, too heavy for most to know before their time comes. He came home plastered, nearly unconscious