Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Love was never a mistake, even when it wasn't returned. It was not unlike the phlox in Catherine Avery's garden, untended, ignored, but there all the same.

Love someone and they're yours forever, no matter how much time intervenes, that's what Margaret Grey knew. The sky will always be blue; the wind will always rise up across the meadow and thread its way through the grass.

It had been better to have viewed him from a distance, so that his flaws were left unseen.

That's still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.

He felt like an addict, out of control, unable to stop himself from taking what he imagined he was entitled to, not yet understanding that no one is entitled to anything other than his freedom and the choices he makes.

Writing itself was a magical act in which imagination altered reality and gave form to power. To

She was so close to the sea that when Maria licked her lips she tasted salt. There were different kinds of birds here, gulls and terns that wheeled through the pink-tinged sky. Soon the water she walked through was brackish, and all along the shore small crabs burrowed in the mud. Maria climbed a tree in which to safely rest for the evening, and from that high vantage point she could see blue in the distance, the miraculous sea.

Her salvation was the novels she read. On nights she thought it might br better not to be alive w/o Levi in the world, she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell.

Believers with nothing to believe in.

WITCHES TAKE THEIR NAMES FROM PLACES, for places are what give them their strength. The place need not be beautiful, or habitable, or even green. Sand and salt, so much the better. Scrub pine, plumberry, and brambles, better still. From every bitter thing, after all, something hardy will surely grow. From every difficulty, the seed that's sewn is that much stronger.

you are unprepared

Here is the most difficult aspect of forgiveness: You have to ask in order to receive it.

These were the times when children dreamed about nuclear testing and falling stars. There was an undercurrent of unrest, like a wave, racial division in the cities, the war halfway around the world blooming with blood.

It was a warm and breezy day, too warm for Sally's heavy clothes, so she draped her coat over her arm. The sun went through the fabric of her dress, a hot hand across flesh and bones. Sally felt as though she'd been dead and now that she was back she was particularly sensitive to the world of the living: the touch of the wind against her skin, the gnats in the air, the scent of mud and new leaves, the sweetness of blues and greens.

How can we understand life? It's impossible.

I fear myself more than I fear any bear,' Emily blurted. It was the way she'd felt in her aloneness, the comfort she took in being on the mountain.

She didn't understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it's what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.

there was a storm of enormous proportions, with winds so strong that dozens of fish were drawn up from the reedy shallows, then lifted above the village in a shining cloud of scales.

Franny stood up with the intention of leaving. When Hay took her arm, she glared at him. But he was looking at her the way he used to, when he was the only person in the world who really knew her.

In his writings, Dr. Burke-Owens proposed a theory of personality that placed nature over nurture, stating there was no way to change a child's core personality. Not only was the brain hardwired, he proposed, but the soul was as well. There was no way to escape one's personal genetics, despite a healthy environment, and this did not bode well for Frances and Bridget and Vincent.

You think you know somebody, but what do you know? Only what they want to show you. Remember, it's what's inside that matters.

He had appeared beside her because she had wanted him to. She had called him to her, and was calling him still. Even when she fell asleep, she dreamed of water, as if the world were topsy-turvy and everything she cared about had been lost in the deep. She plunged through the green waves with her eyes wide open, searching for the world as she'd known it, but that world no longer existed; everything that had once been solid was liquid now, and the birds swam alongside the fish.

Where was her soul? Was it up above her in a tree, perched there like a goblin?

if anyone bothered to search through the laurel bordering the asphalt he'd surely find handfuls of teeth that were said to give the laurel its odd milky color, ivory with a pale pink edge, each blossom forming the shape of a bitter man's mouth.