Quotes from Alice Hoffman

It's still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I'm sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you.

Everything she loved had already happened and had already been.

that at the conference in Evian as far back as 1938, thirty-two countries in the League of Nations had voted not to help Jewish refugees fleeing Germany? Even America had refused to accept 20,000 endangered refugee children.

Only now did I realize what the hermit was telling me, that love was never a regret.

I had swallowed my share of bitterness, but a portion had stuck in my throat and turned to rage.

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.

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.

Swedenborg, the Christian mystic, and the sentiment of charity as divine spoke deeply to him. He felt swept up in something far bigger than himself.

Without courage, you will never find the answer

Sometimes you know when doors will open; you have only to walk up to them and wait.

The fact that she's the high point of someone's life is pathetic. She's probably never loved her mother more than she does at this moment. Maybe she didn't even know what love was before today.

This was green magic, visionary in nature, blending the soul of the individual with the soul of the earth.

The future was spun from moments like this. If she backed away, it might all unravel.

You don't have to worry about the curse anymore," she'd reassured him as they'd walked along the landscape of their past

If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few who will.

I would only understand her grief when my child caused me my own.

Take one risk and you'll soon take more. It's an addition or it's bravery, it's foolishness or it's desperation.

When you fall in love like that, time doesn't matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.

P. L. Travers once said, 'A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

She had always been a practical girl, and was one still. "I know there's no such thing as what you say we are. It's a fairy tale, a compilation of people's groundless fears.

Nothing would ever be the same, but Hannah had taught her that there were times, rare as they were, when what was done could be undone.

What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

I'll pretend to be who they want me to be.' He grinned then, and she saw his youth. 'But it won't work. In the end I'll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.