Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Once upon a time I was young and beautiful. But that is the fairy tale, because it all passes in the blink of an eye.”

— Alice Hoffman

102. “Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”

— Alice Hoffman

103. “The sisters were glad to be together. They had the easy sort of relationship where they didn’t have to speak to be understood.”

— Alice Hoffman

104. “Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I’d always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.”

— Alice Hoffman

105. “A woman who knows what she wants, Adelle always told me, is likely to receive it.”

— Alice Hoffman

106. “Witches are made, not born.”

— Alice Hoffman

108. “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 couldn’t bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.”

— Alice Hoffman

109. “They sat in the light of a lantern and drank cups of Courage Tea, a blend of currants, spices, and thyme, made for protection and healing, a mixture that needed to steep for a long time. It was an elixir that made it clear one should never hide who one was. That was the first step toward courage. In this way, magic began.”

— Alice Hoffman

110. “Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.”

— Alice Hoffman

111. “Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.”

— Alice Hoffman

112. “Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn’t that the point? Happily ever after doesn’t mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?”

— Alice Hoffman

113. “What is meant to be is bound to happen, whether or not you approve.”

— Alice Hoffman

114. “I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.”

— Alice Hoffman

115. “Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.”

— Alice Hoffman

116. “You can’t dispute the ridiculous. You can’t argue reasonably with evil.”

— Alice Hoffman

117. “Writing itself was a magical act in which imagination altered reality and gave form to power.”

— Alice Hoffman

118. “I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?”

— Alice Hoffman

119. “You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful and beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this.”

— Alice Hoffman

120. “There are none who can fight as fiercely as a mother and a daughter, and none who can forgive more completely.”

— Alice Hoffman

121. “I never even believed in happiness. I didn’t think it existed. Now look at me. I’m ready to believe in just about anything.”

— Alice Hoffman

122. “What’s done cannot be undone. What’s set into motion takes on a life of its own.”

— Alice Hoffman

123. “Remember what I’ve told you. Remember me.”

— Alice Hoffman

124. “If I hadn’t learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We’d seen what we’d come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upwards, black and blue into the even bluer sky.”

— Alice Hoffman

125. “She is surrounded by stalks of dahlias, orange and yellow and pale red, with leaves so big you could write your life story on each one. She looks like a flower in the garden, just like her mother said.”

— Alice Hoffman

126. “My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.”

— Alice Hoffman

128. “Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn’t exist. We met before we were born and we’ll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that’s the way we’re planning it.”

— Alice Hoffman

129. “The more you feel, the stronger you are.”

— Alice Hoffman

130. “Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility.”

— Alice Hoffman

131. “The only way to understand a river is to jump into it.”

— Alice Hoffman

132. “Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you’re left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.”

— Alice Hoffman

133. “This is how you begin in this world. These are the lessons to be learned. Drink chamomile tea to calm the spirit. Feed a cold and starve a fever. Read as many books as you can. Always choose courage. Never watch another woman burn. Know that love is the only answer.”

— Alice Hoffman

134. “It was as if hope had appeared out of nowhere to settle beside her and it wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t going to desert her now.”

— Alice Hoffman

135. “Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight.”

— Alice Hoffman

136. “She didn’t like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.”

— Alice Hoffman

137. “She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He’s like a dragon, ancient and fearless.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

141. “My breath came out in a fog and rose into the milky sky. Snow fell on my eyelashes, and all of Brooklyn turned white, a world in a globe. Every snowflake that I caught was a miracle unlike any other.”

— Alice Hoffman

142. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

143. “Just because something is unspoken doesn’t mean that it disappears.”

— Alice Hoffman

144. “Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn’t that the point? Happily ever after doesn’t mean happy forever.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

146. “People will disappoint you with their cruelty every time.”

— Alice Hoffman

147. “That was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.”

— Alice Hoffman

148. “It was a moment made of glass, this happiness; it was the easiest thing in the world to break. Every minute was a world, every hour a universe.”

— Alice Hoffman

149. “Some people can’t be warned away from disaster, you can try, you can put up every alert, but they’ll still go their own way.”

— Alice Hoffman

150. “Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.”

— Alice Hoffman