Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “He is gone and all we have is this world, here and now.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

203. “What men yearn for they often destroy.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

206. “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

207. “I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

218. “She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her.”

— Alice Hoffman

219. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

229. “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

230. “People said love was the antidote to hate, that it could mend what was most broken, and give hope in the most hopeless of times.”

— Alice Hoffman

231. “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

232. “Maria Owens did what she did for a reason. She was young and she thought damning anyone who loved us would protect us. But what she had with that terrible man wasn’t love. She didn’t understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it’s what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.”

— Alice Hoffman

233. “After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city.”

— Alice Hoffman

234. “I’m fated to lose everyone I ever love,” April said. “I already know that.” “Of course you are,” Jet responded in her calm, measured tone. “That’s what it means to be alive.”

— Alice Hoffman

235. “The truth was written upon us, as they say men’s sins are written on their bones so that when they die their wicked deeds can be read as if written upon parchment.”

— Alice Hoffman

236. “Crying wasn’t like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it’s done.”

— Alice Hoffman

237. “I didn’t understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her. It gave me my strength, but it gave me my weakness as well.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

239. “What is broken can also be mended.”

— Alice Hoffman

240. “Never look at other people’s bad fortune,′ my mother said. ‘If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner.”

— Alice Hoffman

241. “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

242. “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

243. “In good time every secret must be shared and every miracle called into question.”

— Alice Hoffman

244. “My expectations of what I wanted in a man I learned from a dog: loyalty and kindness.”

— Alice Hoffman

245. “The garden was burning, the air sparked with specks of flame as they say it will be in the World-to-Come when we walk beside the angels and have no fear of their illuminations or of their might.”

— Alice Hoffman

246. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

247. “You never know what you want or need until you are old, for old age is a mystery that is impossible to unwind until you step into its maze.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

249. “Truth felt light and green, but a lie sunk to the floor, heavy as metal, a substance she always avoided for it made her feel as though she was trapped behind bars.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman