Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Did they not know 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.

But now he had been forced to learn many skills; how to fix a roof, how to cook, how to steal, how to say goodbye.

It's easy to keep to yourself if you hang back and always sit in the last row and slip around corners as if you were a ghost.

I thought he knew me better than most...Then one nigh Jack brought me flowers, a handful of fading daisies he'd picked up at a farm stand, but flowers all the same. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything.

The silver trout were so numerous that if every one had turned into a star, the river would have been shining with light; a man out on a skiff would then be able to find his way past Hamilton, all the way into Boston, guided by a shimmering band of water.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.

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.

That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.

I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, 'More than you know.'

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned.

I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

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

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing

No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

I read everything of Ray Bradbury when I was 12 or 13, and I think that's the most effective time to read Bradbury. He built such a moral world, where you have to make decisions and grow up.

My sorrow is I used to read all the time and now, as a writer, I don't have the time to read.