Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Fate was what you made of it. You could make the best of it, or it would make the best of you.

Loss does different things to different people. Some fall apart. Some, like the Finder, rebuild. I have done both. I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story. Surely, I can never sit in judgment of the lost or the found.

Shelby told her that if she had a hundred lifetimes she would want Sue to be her mother in every one, just as for a hundred lifetimes she would want James to be the one that stopped on the road that night. She would want him to stay here. She would want him to know her when no one else did.

The Essenes forbade idols, as we did, but they were far stricter in their practices and would not even touch a coin with an imprint upon it. They believed no man should be king. Still they would not lift up arms or fight their oppressors. We were in the hands of Adonai, they insisted, therefore arrows and spears were meaningless. There were children of darkness and children of light and the true battle on earth was to remain in the light and praise the one who knows all, Elohim.

Winter in New England is merciless and cruel, a season that instills a particular melancholy in its residents and a hopelessness that is all but impossible to shake.

Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else's business.

One word is spoken aloud and the world changes.

It was best to step into the future while it was still waiting for you.

Any woman can make a mistake, especially when she is young, and sees the wrong man through a haze so that he appears to be something he's not.

She had the distinct impression that something was beginning and something was ending; there were just so many days like this left to them. Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they'd be, grown women who'd forgotten how long a summer could last.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.

The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman.

She had ruined my father's life, and mine, and she didn't seem to notice. She was the sort of person who saw only herself and her shadow, and the rest of us disappeared in the bright sunlight.

Keep your eyes open," Isabelle told the siblings. "You may see her in the yard. This is what happens when you repudiate who you are. Once you do that, life works against you, and your fate is no longer your own.

I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.

Would you like to know your fatal flaw?' Eddie flushed with annoyance. He could have easily made a list of Hochman's flaws, enough to fill several pages. Still, he was curious. 'Please do tell.' 'You judge what you don't understand.

She wore a wide-brimmed black hat and men's trousers, and she carried a satchel of books to ensure that if she should finish one volume she would be handily prepared with the next.

She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. "Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

Do as you will, but harm no one. What you give will be returned to you threefold.

He had lived the sort of life that had soon revealed that any man who asks for undying loyalty is the man most likely to get you killed.

Don't you tell your father a thing," she'd warn me. "It would kill him. You'd do better if you kept your mouth shut.

She was inexperienced enough to assume what they had was love because she wanted him, and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.

Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can't even see. It's there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.