Quotes by Alice Hoffman

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.

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.

I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, theyd look, theyd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell what my rotten disposition was. Deep down, I wanted a commitment with a capital C. To get anywhere with me, a boy would have to sign his undying loyalty with his own blood.

Books may well be the only true magic.

Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldnt bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other peoples houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.

She allowed me to understand Id done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me she was afraid. It was exactly what I wanted when I had cancer and I thought I was going to die. I should have sat down next to her, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. Thats all anyone wants. It took me a long time to figure this out. Its a complicated human puzzle. But its never too late to know that love is all you need.

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesnt exist. We met before we were born and well probably still know each other after we die. At least, thats the way were planning it.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

...who I am to talk? I dream of rain.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women whove been in love with the wrong man too often.

I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

From the time I could read, I found solace in my fathers library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

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

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.

Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.