Quotes from Alice Hoffman

You're like the weird fucked-up sister of yourself, Shelby. Whereas I'm just an extension of my loser self that anyone could have foreseen. I have followed the path set out before me. You veered.

He's so kindhearted no dog has ever barked at him. No child has ever cried in front of him. No bee has ever tried to sting him.

When you help others, your own troubles aren't as heavy. In fact, you can fold them like a handkerchief and place them in your pocket. They're still there, but they're not the only thing you carry.

The author P. L. Travers once said, 'A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

If anything, love was like light, illuminating what no one would have ever guessed was there in the darkness.

Tell a witch to go, and she'll plant her feet on the ground and stay exactly where she is. Instead of doing as she's told, she'll take a knife to her arm and let her blood drip onto the ground, and in that way she will claim the earth for herself and for her daughters and for all the daughters who follow her. It is the future she's claiming, the right to be a woman who can do as she pleases.

It was a small ceremony at the town hall, and they didn't exchange wedding rings, but they kissed for so long at the counter in the hall of records that they were asked to leave.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened.

You cannot unwrite a death that has been written.

Someone killed himself because of me once, Meredith said. People kill themselves because of what's inside of them, not because of other people.

Every time a new house was built, a bucket of peach stones would be found, and even children on their way to school knew that finding one meant luck, whatever the outcome: love forgotten, love gone wrong, love despite all odds, love ever after, love after all this time.

But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain's daughter who believed that people could fly.

The air was soft, as it often was in this lovely month, and Eddie inhaled its sweetness. He found himself uplifted as he worked, caught up in something outside himself and his petty wants and needs. The clouds drifted like ice in a tumbler. Through his lens the river seemed made of light, there was the shimmer, and for a moment the world seemed whole to him.

The truth frightens people because it isn't stable. It shifts every day. If you'd prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.

She was partial to emeralds; she said they were the single thing that remained constant, always green, always the same...My mother had been right, it was one thing that lasted, the one thing we could depend on. Other than our love for each other, it was all we had right now.

One morning when the air was misleading and mild with hope....

In Berlin evil came to them slowly and then all at once.

People said love was the antidote to hate, that it could mend what was most broken, and give hope in the most hopeless of times.

The only way to understand a river is to jump into it.

I'm sticking with books. They never let you down and they don't judge you.

I would not begin to understand until I was a very old woman, and even then they would still be a mystery.

I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter's hair.

Why can't people say what they mean at the time?

He carries books everywhere he goes so he won't have to be bored by people.