Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don't think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year.

Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more.

I didn't want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.

Jill told me that when you're really in love, you know right away. I'm not exactly sure how this happens. Is it like a flash of lightning? Like an angel tapping you on the shoulder? Or is it similar to choosing a puppy? You think you're picking the cutest one, but really you wind up going home with the one who keeps insisting on climbing into your lap.

You cannot dispute the ridiculous. You cannot argue reasonably with evil.

What men yearn for they often destroy.

I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back.

Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren't meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were. And what we remember.

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.

She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless.

I'm fated to lose everyone I ever love," April said. "I already know that." "Of course you are," Jet responded in her calm, measured tone. "That's what it means to be alive.

You can never tell about a person by guessing...that's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

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.

Love) walks up to you,and when it does, you need to recognize it for what it is and, perhaps more important, for what it might become.

We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight.

Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.

It's not the lie that's the problem; it's the distance the lie forges between you.

She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

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