Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I had lost my mother and my father and my sister, and sometimes when I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t lost myself as well.”

— Alice Hoffman

202. “I think growing up is difficult and it’s a process that I’m always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.”

— Alice Hoffman

203. “I just stored up my hurts, as if they were a tower made of fallen stars, invisible to most people, but brightly burning inside of me.”

— Alice Hoffman

204. “All of the quarters in his hand were tarnished. He had no idea that the silver in a man’s pockets always turns black if he kisses a witch.”

— Alice Hoffman

205. “You are the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all we needed. For that, and for a thousand other things, I send my gratitude.”

— Alice Hoffman

206. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

207. “If anything, love was like light, illuminating what no one would have ever guessed was there in the darkness.”

— Alice Hoffman

208. “I would have drowned without you to watch over me... I now understand there are a thousand ways to drown, and a thousand ways to rescue someone.”

— Alice Hoffman

209. “You lose people sometimes, you know. You don’t expect to, but then it happens and you can’t get them back.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

211. “They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.”

— Alice Hoffman

212. “Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones.”

— Alice Hoffman

213. “Franny whispered to Haylin all that she ever was and had been. She told him that she had always known what the future would be, and he said that if what she said was true, then she should have known a very long time ago that this was meant to be.”

— Alice Hoffman

214. “I’m at the point where going forward is easier than going back.”

— Alice Hoffman

215. “To love someone so complicated you had to be committed to a single emotion – the way you loved him – no matter what. In that way, it was indeed simple.”

— Alice Hoffman

216. “My grandmother was overwhelmed by what was happening to us. She ahd moved back into the past because the here and the now was too terrible.”

— Alice Hoffman

217. “Butter melting on a dish meant someone nearby was in love, and a bird in the house take your bad luck out the window.”

— Alice Hoffman

218. “I thought about how it was impossible to forget, no matter how hard anyone might try.”

— Alice Hoffman

219. “When you help others, your own troubles aren’t as heavy. In fact, you can fold them like a handkerchief and place them in your pocket. They’re still there, but they’re not the only thing you carry.”

— Alice Hoffman

220. “Love more, her aunt had said. Not less.”

— Alice Hoffman

221. “The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand.”

— Alice Hoffman

222. “Put us in a jar, she thought. Put us in eternity.”

— Alice Hoffman

223. “It’s for your own good,” she said tenderly. “All I want for you is a normal life.” “Mother,” Franny sighed. “What makes you think that’s what I want?”

— Alice Hoffman

224. “What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive.”

— Alice Hoffman

225. “We never know the end of the story until we get there.”

— Alice Hoffman

226. “Don’t worry. I’m not afraid of words.”

— Alice Hoffman

227. “Such was the case with most unhappy students; they avoided even one another, so intent on their own unhappiness they failed to notice the other lost souls around them.”

— Alice Hoffman

228. “Anything whole can be broken,” Isabelle told her. “And anything broken can be put back together again. That is the meaning of Abracadabra. I create what I speak.”

— Alice Hoffman

229. “He opened his eyes for an instant. Other people were writing and melting, but my brother stopped his flight long enough to look at me. An instant that would have to last forever. And then the flames rose higher and my brother was gone.”

— Alice Hoffman

230. “Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.”

— Alice Hoffman

231. “For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.”

— Alice Hoffman

232. “The craft was dangerous and unpredictable, and witches were difficult to control, for they had minds of their own and didn’t hold to keeping to the law.”

— Alice Hoffman

233. “Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.”

— Alice Hoffman

234. “Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can’t even see. It’s there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.”

— Alice Hoffman

235. “The truth frightens people because it isn’t stable. It shifts every day. If you’d prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.”

— Alice Hoffman

236. “Sometimes words spoken are the ones you’ve been afraid to think, but once they’re said aloud there’s no way to make them disappear.”

— Alice Hoffman

237. “Her one salvation was the novels she read. On nights when she thought it might be better not to be alive without Levi in the world, she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell. She.”

— Alice Hoffman

238. “They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I’m interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women’s stories are all kind of combined.”

— Alice Hoffman

239. “A decade or two on the rocks gives a person character. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in Gillian’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.”

— Alice Hoffman

240. “Cleaning up after themselves was a low priority for Margo and my mother. They had both recovered from cancer scares, failed marriages, and lost hope; in their opinion, dirt could wait.”

— Alice Hoffman

241. “I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.”

— Alice Hoffman

242. “The best way to die is when your living.”

— Alice Hoffman

243. “A lifetime is a lifetime whether it lasts one night or a hundred years.”

— Alice Hoffman

244. “But children can tell when love has been lost, they know when silence means peace and when it’s a sign of despair.”

— Alice Hoffman

245. “Some people know the exact moment when they’ve lost everything. They can look back and see it plain as day and for the life of them they can’t understand why they didn’t spot the situation as it was happening.”

— Alice Hoffman

246. “Life is beautiful, just very unfair.”

— Alice Hoffman

247. “The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove.”

— Alice Hoffman

248. “That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls.”

— Alice Hoffman

249. “Sometimes movies really are the best medicine.”

— Alice Hoffman

250. “In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.”

— Alice Hoffman