Quotes from Alice Hoffman

All this kissing was making her crazy; it was reminding her of what she could feel, and how it could be when you wanted someone as much as he wanted you.

If I hadn't learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We'd seen what we'd come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms -- those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about everything.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside? At the library I couldn't help but notice which patrons checked out the same books. They appeared to have nothing in common, but who could tell what a person was truly made of? The unknown, the riddle, the deepest truth. I noticed them all: the ones who'd lost their way, the ones who'd lived their lives in ashes, the ones who had to prove themselves, the ones who, like me, had lost the ability to feel.

Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

They weren't true stories; they were better than that.

For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.

What you dream, you can grow. Someone told me that, but I didn't believe it. I said I had nothing and that people with nothing are unable to dream. But I was wrong.

This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.

Helplessness and anger make for predictable behavior: Children are certain to shove each other and pull hair, teenagers will call each other names and cry, and grown women who are sisters will say words so cruel that each syllable will take on the form of a snake, although such a snake often circles in on itself to eat its own tail once the words are said aloud.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

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.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

You rescue something and you're responsible for it. But maybe that's what love is. Maybe it's like a hit-and-run accident; it smashes you before you can think. You do it no matter the cost and you keep on running

My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.

In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.

Some stories begin at the beginning and others begin at the end, but all the best stories begin in a library.

I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.

When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

The frightened walk away when love is difficult. I know that now. You have to be willing to give everything away. You have to be willing to end up with nothing. Only then will your heart be whole.

As I turned the pages, I felt as if there were bees on my fingertips, for I had never felt so alive as when reading.