Quotes from Alice Hoffman

It's so cold that Shelby thinks her fingers inside her gloves are turning blue. Maybe they'll turn to sugar candy and break off and there'll be a fairy-tale ending when one taste of her sugar-stick fingers will cure Helene.

Doesn't everyone want what they cannot have?

I don't think I'm the smart sister, Isabel said. You are, Sophie told her. You just have a lot to learn.

Stop acting like you know me," Isabel said. "Well, you for sure do not know me. I'm not the person I used to be," Johnny said. "We're always the people we used to be," Isabel said.

Ignore love, she now understood, and a person might bleed forever, even if no one could tell.

Be cautious, be sure of yourself, be careful of outsiders, beware of women who have the nerve to meet your eyes, who think they're your equals, who do as they please, who please you as well, who will never do as they're told. Maria glanced behind her when they reached the sea.

Into this cake Lila had baked three gifts: a cool hand to test for fevers, a kiss with the power to chase away nightmares, a heart that can tell when it's time to let go.

This is the way it happens. You walk into a room with blue walls. You kiss a man in the garden. You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.

You can't change what's meant to be

So often love was invisible; sometimes only two people could see it, and everyone else was blind.

Those women who could read were revered and feared, for they were the most skilled in love magic.

Ben would have done anything for you." "I thought that meant he was an idiot." "No," Maravelle says. "It means you're an idiot.

Shelby had thought distance from her hometown would make a difference, but she still feels she's responsible for everything bad that has ever happened in the world. She has bad karma.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining.

There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight.

It's amazing what you can block out when you really try. Although some things stay with you no matter what they affect everything that you do.

How love could change a person, how it could cause you the greatest sorrow or shelter you from harm.

Shelby has absolutely nothing inside of her. She's a black hole. A sinkhole. A whole lot of nothing. She's told Ben that, but he doesn't want to believe her. Who would have imagined he'd turn out to be such an optimist?

She had the ability to spot a liar, except for the lies spoken by someone she loved. That's what had caught her up; she'd been distracted by love, which seemed, at least at the time, to be the truest thing in the world.

deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken. "Wake up," Shelby would

It's just for people who want to escape real life." Isabel remembered what books had meant to her so long ago, and she suddenly had a longing for all those fictional worlds that had helped her through the worst years of her life.

Keep the light out, have faith, trust in what you feel, not in what you see. Leave the matches at home. Leave it be.

some things you carry around inside you as though they were part of your blood and bones, and when that happens, there's nothing you can do to forget.

I no longer cared if my mother disliked me. I didn't understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her. It gave me my strength, but it gave me my weakness as well.