Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Moonstones were useful in connecting with the living, topaz to contact the dead. Copper, sacred to Venus, will call a man to you, and black tourmaline will eliminate jealousy.

This was the purest instant he had ever experienced; the way he felt inside right then. If he had to be trapped in a forever he would choose this very moment. The black night, the few yellow leaves still clinging to the bare trees, the beautiful dark-eyed woman drinking whiskey, the way she gazed at him, the way she made him feel.

Tuesdays were meant for accidents, disappointments, and bad news. Long ago, the day was considered to belong to Mars, the god of war and blood. Now it just meant trouble—it meant that your past could come back to haunt you.

They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.

Where there were lilacs there would be luck.

Even now as the graves of these women went untended, and their passings unmourned, the seeds they had scattered turned the hillsides red and orange from May to September. Some called the pirates' bounty flame trees, but to us they were known as flamboyant trees, for no one could ignore their glorious blooms, with flowers that were larger than a man's open hand. Every time I saw them I thought of these lost women. That was what happened if you waited for love.

sometimes the right thing felt all wrong until it was over and done with.

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.

When it came to love, you must always be careful. If you dropped something belonging to the man you loved into a candle flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, he would arrive on your doorstep by morning, so you would do well to be certain you wanted him there.

If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you'd wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you'd have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse of Boston.

Do you think your mother came back? Shelby asks him. Definitely. She's a cardinal who lives in my backyard.

A glass breaking on its own portended death.

Bespomo?nost i gnjev izazivaju predvidljivo ponašanje: djeca se naguravaju i potežu za kosu, tinejdžeri se nazivaju pogrdnim nazivima i pla?u, a odrasle žene koje su sestre izgovorit ?e si rije?i tako okrutne da ?e svaki slog poprimiti oblik zmije, iako se takva zmija ?esto smota oko sebe i ugrize za vlastiti rep, jednom kad se rije?i glasno izgovore.

Who would have guessed you'd be crying over that old hay bag." But that wasn't it at all, Elinor saw that from the look on his face when he turned to her. That was the attachment, that was the way he held on to her.

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

Let love be one, let it heal what had been broken, let it open the door to hope for the future.

but promise can disappear if you leave it to flounder

was in this way that the mother discovered that she still had the will to live, even now, and she was usually the first one to help when the cottage was rebuilt.

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

ghosts are said to move in the corners of human sight.

She could even forget that she had once been considered the girl most likely to become somebody, when she'd turned out to be nobody in particular.

That was when I came to understand that freaks of nature and ordinary people had no business being together.

Her heart, though broken, still beat.

Lightening, like love, is never ruled by logic. Accidents happen, and they always will.