Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Always love someone who will love you back.

When you are young you are looking forward and when you are old you are looking back.

At midnight the wind in the trees can sound like the ocean. The moonlight can make a road appear as endless as the sea.

He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.

Maria Owens did what she did for a reason. She was young and she thought damning anyone who loved us would protect us. But what she had with that terrible man wasn't love. She didn't understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it's what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.

Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.

It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone — maybe even more alone — than I was…

Fourth time's the charm, she says to people who ask her what the secret of a happy marriage is, but that's not the way she feels about it. She knows now that when you don't lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that's one recipe that can't be tampered with.

He has the ability to catch someone by the way that he looks at her, and make her wish he would go on looking.

Sometimes I think we can learn everything we need to know about the world when we read fairy tales. Be careful, be fearless, be honest, leave a trail of crumbs to lead you home again.

People say if you face your worst fear, the rest is easy, but those are people who are afraid of rattlesnakes or enclosed spaces, not of themselves and the horrible things they've done.

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

Fuck you," Sally says. She tosses the words off, easy as butter in her mouth, but in fact she doesn't think she's ever cursed out loud in her own house before. "Fuck you twice," Gillian says. "You need it more.

All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn't been divulged.

early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.

He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.

Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man's heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task.

Remember what I've told you. Remember me.

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

I thought that love was a river, endless and deep. I thought it merely happened, washing over you like water. It was nothing to search for, nothing to force. I didn't understand that even when we can't control our fate, we alone have the last say in matters of the heart. We can give it freely, even in the worst of times, even when it isn't returned.

If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand.

You were the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all that we needed.

The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.