Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Of course, she always thinks then. Math plus desire equals who you are. For the first time she has begun to appreciate her own gray eyes.

Each time I opened the window in my bedroom I smelled salt and fish and human desire. I knew what I wanted: my own place in the world, not a path I took because I was under my father's command but one I had chosen for myself. I wanted to know how other girls my age wore their hair, for mine was still in braids as if I were a child. How had they learned to dance, choose silk dresses from the shops, form friendships?

I'd lived my whole life without a friend. I'd just have to remember how to do that again.

I thought perhaps it was more important to listen than to be heard.

How's our blue rose? the doctor asked. ... If you really want to know, I feel sorry for the poor thing, Elinor went on. All wrapped up that way. I'm starting to think there's no point in being a rose if you're tied up and covered with burlap.

It was the time when the field mice ventured out, after the hawks had settled in the trees but before the owls came to hunt. The sky was now the color Elv liked best - a tender dark blue, falling to earth like ashes.

No matter what, the past would follow around. A sorry soul that only grew heavier in each town. She couldn't run away.

TAKE ONE RISK AND you'll soon take more. It's an addiction or it's bravery, it's foolishness or it's desperation.

Somehow, I knew how alone he felt, and it gave me shivers to think that alienation could be a shared experience.

What I wanted to know had both nothing and everything to do with the natural world. I wished to know love.

I wrote Seventh Heaven for my mother who I miss every day From Facebook post

out from under the far side of the table

Coralie felt something pierce through her, as if she were a fish on a hook, unable to break free. She felt a tie to the stranger, drawn to his every movement.

Some people are who you think they are. Some people hide the wolf inside of them, but you can hear them howl.

He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.

Men will be men," Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. "Don't complain," she advised. "That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.

What was a siren but a call to your neighbors, a cry that would let them know that grief of one sort or another was coming through, as it did for someone every day, every evening.

Love could do that to some people, and they wouldn't even know how much they'd missed out on; they simply remained in place where love had left them, while the whole world spun around.

Close your eyes and listen, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you're certain you've lost your way completely, you'll be there. Open your eyes.

What is made of water and fire -- for isn't that what a man whose nature opposes his responsibilities can be said to be? Does one quench the other, or do they combine to ignite the depths of the soul?

To hell with human beings. I'd always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.

With his words, he could approach the soul where it resided, a glory to God, for words were what the Almighty first created, after the silence of the world, and they were Eleazar ben Ya'ir's gift as well.

She had learned how to make elixirs for fevers and rashes and potions for love, and as it turned out, magic came back to her, not the bloodline magic she'd been born with, but the magic she made for herself. This was the fate she had chosen.

And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.