Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “They had likely been together twenty times, an entire world created in just days.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

453. “Lust was a story I knew. There were many women I took to bed for the night. I yearned for them in the moment, but in the morning, any lover Id had was already claimed by the past, even if she was still calling my name.”

— Alice Hoffman

454. “And what of monsters? Can they love too? We know quite well they can. For we know that they do.”

— Alice Hoffman

455. “That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.”

— Alice Hoffman

456. “This was the virtue of the dark: you were who you had always been, only no one could see you.”

— Alice Hoffman

457. “Likely it was true that the flaws you saw in other women you didn’t notice in yourself.”

— Alice Hoffman

458. “I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter’s hair.”

— Alice Hoffman

459. “Perhaps in the cold my heart would freeze and I would care nothing for those I was forced to abandon.”

— Alice Hoffman

460. “The place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.”

— Alice Hoffman

461. “I’d thrown my fate away once, and I would never again allow other people’s opinions rule my life. As a girl I’d done what was necessary, but I was a girl no longer. Adelle.”

— Alice Hoffman

462. “He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth.”

— Alice Hoffman

463. “She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she’ll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom.”

— Alice Hoffman

464. “Forever – is composed of – Nows.”

— Alice Hoffman

465. “It’s not easy. It never is. That is the secret our parents fail to tell us, out of kindness and love, but it’s a secret we need to know. Everything that begins, ends. Everything beautiful disappears.”

— Alice Hoffman

466. “But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.”

— Alice Hoffman

467. “When you fall in love like that, time doesn’t matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said. What belonged to you once, will always belong to you. Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.”

— Alice Hoffman

468. “But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don’t amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most.”

— Alice Hoffman

469. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

470. “On some nights it was best to remember the past, and not shut it in a drawer. Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women.”

— Alice Hoffman

471. “She begged for time to stop, for clocks to break, for every star to remain fixed. But none of that happened.”

— Alice Hoffman

472. “Life is trouble, brother. You’ve got to fight for what you want.”

— Alice Hoffman

473. “You can get addicted to trouble if you’re not careful.”

— Alice Hoffman

474. “You walk into the dark and the darkness abides within you.”

— Alice Hoffman

475. “Fate is what you make of it... You can make the best of it, or you can let it make the best of you.”

— Alice Hoffman

476. “Whoever gives his true self away does do with words.”

— Alice Hoffman

477. “It was so much easier to see another person’s future than it was to understand your own. Even when you kept your eyes wide open, the world would surprise you.”

— Alice Hoffman

478. “She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral.”

— Alice Hoffman

479. “In the dining hall of the home, Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she’d been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.”

— Alice Hoffman

480. “What is a daughter but good fortune, as complicated as she might be.”

— Alice Hoffman

481. “It was easy to lie to people who still believed in the truth.”

— Alice Hoffman

482. “It is simply the way of the world to lose everything you have ever loved. In this, we are like everyone else.”

— Alice Hoffman

483. “I have wondered all my life what I am made of, if there is a straw inside of me, or a beating heart, or if I simply burned for all I did not have.”

— Alice Hoffman

484. “It helped to write things down. It ordered your thoughts and if you were lucky revealed feelings you didn’t know you had.”

— Alice Hoffman

485. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

486. “For a man tells you who he is the instant you meet him, all you have to do is listen.”

— Alice Hoffman

487. “If this was what angels observed when they gazed upon our world, how we might murder each other and cause one another agony, then I pitied them as I pitied no others.”

— Alice Hoffman

488. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

489. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

490. “If there be a cure, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.”

— Alice Hoffman

491. “I fear myself more than I fear any bear,′ Emily blurted. It was the way she’d felt in her aloneness, the comfort she took in being on the mountain.”

— Alice Hoffman

492. “Nathaniel Hawthorne had placed the w in his name to distance himself from his cruel ancestor, his writing driven by his desire to make amends for all the evil his great-great-grandfather had done in the world.”

— Alice Hoffman

493. “Shelby is brutally honest. That’s why Maravelle likes her. Maravelle is brutally honest too. You can’t have many friends if you act that way, but you can depend on the ones you have.”

— Alice Hoffman

494. “I knew that men told you the truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn’t bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn’t be lost.”

— Alice Hoffman

495. “Things without all remedy should be without regard. But what you can cure, do so willingly. What ails the human body and soul may be difficult to diagnose, but just as often there is a simple resolution. Black pepper for aching muscles, linden root and yarrow for high blood pressure, feverfew for migraines, ginger for motion sickness, watercress to ease labored breathing, vervain to quiet the pangs of unrequited love.”

— Alice Hoffman

496. “You once said that just as anything whole can be broken, anything broken can be put back together again.”

— Alice Hoffman

497. “Things without all remedy should be without regard.”

— Alice Hoffman

498. “Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.”

— Alice Hoffman

499. “You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.”

— Alice Hoffman

500. “Who can you trust if not your sister? Who knows your story better than she? If you saw one Owens sister at the grocery, the other would be right beside her. If one was working in the garden, making certain the rows of herbs were weeded, her sister would be there as well, carrying a basket to collect the dandelion greens.”

— Alice Hoffman