Quotes by Alice Hoffman

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

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. Shed know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if shed had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.

But now I understood that, although words were Gods first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didnt recognize her friend. Juliet hadnt bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.

The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.

That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldnt die; shed have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. Ive got to get to the bottom of this one, shed say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought shed go on reading forever but it didnt work out that way.

She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when theyre no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

Interesting, but she could see that the boy didnt have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.

Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

He had appeared beside her because she had wanted him to. She had called him to her, and was calling him still. Even when she fell asleep, she dreamed of water, as if the world were topsy-turvy and everything she cared about had been lost in the deep. She plunged through the green waves with her eyes wide open, searching for the world as shed known it, but that world no longer existed; everything that had once been solid was liquid now, and the birds swam alongside the fish.

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.

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

Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and theyd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.