Quotes from Alice Hoffman

I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It's always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay.

Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon.

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.

Sometimes words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

Other people's judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something.

In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier. We all grieve alone.

Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

Do as you will, but harm no one. What you give will be returned to you threefold. Fall in love whenever you can.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?

She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I'd always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.

I know who you are in your heart,' Andres said. 'That's all that matters.' And that was it. That was the moment. Now I knew how I would feel if I ever lost him. That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do was imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.

Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done.

Some things you cannot wish away or think away. They become part of you when you remember them.

Being human means losing everything we love best in the world, she murmured as she released me. But would you ask to be anything else?

This is how you begin in this world. These are the lessons to be learned. Drink chamomile tea to calm the spirit. Feed a cold and starve a fever. Read as many books as you can. Always choose courage. Never watch another woman burn. Know that love is the only answer.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?