Quotes from Alice Hoffman

I could tell people anything I wanted to and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well, then that's who I'd be.

Would you like to have a brother? By now Melek knew much of our language. I would like to have you, he told me. I laughed, but the laughter sounded sharp, like a rock against the both of us, or an arrow, one that could indeed pierce through flesh. I know I can't. So instead I'll have a brother.

She thought she still had a child as a daughter, but she had something entirely different, someone who had turned thirteen.

She doesn't know why she didn't turn out like the girl in Union Square, screaming at passersby, caught in the web of her own pain, but on nights when she's reading her veterinary journals, and the dogs are sleeping, she wonders if it's possible that when she rescued them, they rescued her as well.

Tonight the special was chicken pot pie, but most of the regulars were concentrating on whiskey.

the written conjurations and charms formed by the power of her words were so intense and beautiful they turned silver in the dark and could be read by the light of their meaning alone.

For although Hailey thought nothing of leaping from the highest diving platform or swimming so far out to sea that she disappeared from sight, she was easily frightened by other things - a future she couldn't control, for instance, or the notion that a lifelong friendship might be lost at the end of the week when the Capri closed down for good and Claire moved away.

She'll be imagining everything that's out in front of them, road and cloud and sky, all the elements of a future, the sort you have to put together by hand, slowly and carefully, until the world is yours once more.

don't read. It's a waste of time. It's just for people who want to escape real life.

But those women who wanted someone else's husband, they were the worst. They would do absolutely anything for love. They got all twisted up, like rubber bands, just from the heat of their desire, and they didn't give a damn for convention and good manners.

Over the years I had grown attached to it, as men grow attached to their miseries and their burdens.

There was so much light in the world we knew we would never be able to count it all.

child of a watcher, an angel who had been called to earth by my mother's beauty

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

For a very long time I believed that when we left our home, we left my mother as well. Where our village had stood the burned fields would again become green and her flesh would be in every blade of grass.

I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy. The sea was ever changing, ever interesting

Love begins in curious ways, in daylight or in darkness, when you are in search of it or when you least expect to find it.

Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her.

Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.

If she felt my gaze upon her, I assume she was accustomed to being stared at, just as I was used to wanting what I could not have.

For green is love and luck just as it is jealousy and envy

Love happens in such a way, Maureen told me. It 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.

but inside she was broken, made of bones and black ribbons, blood and darkness.

Jet's hair was so tangled a brush would no longer go through it. She didn't bathe and ate only crackers and ginger ale. She slept with the edition of Emily Dickinson that Levi had given her. Inside he had written Forever—is composed of—Nows.