Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own.”

— Alice Hoffman

203. “There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

205. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

207. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

213. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

236. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

240. “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

241. “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

242. “In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.”

— Alice Hoffman

243. “My father told us that our people had been slaves in the desert and because God had seen fit to set us free, none among us should ever own another man. It had been written that every man belonged to God and no one else. But did women belong to God or to the men of their family? They could not own property or businesses; only their husbands could have that honor.”

— Alice Hoffman

244. “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

245. “Desire had a way of making a person oddly courageous. In the aunts’ opinion, it could sneak up on a grown woman and turn her from a sensible creature into something as foolish as a flea that keeps chasing after the same old dog.”

— Alice Hoffman

246. “When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

248. “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

249. “In my memories I have set my life in Brooklyn between pieces of glass, separate from my current existence, and this has enabled me to move forward. The past cannot tie me in knots, nor can it cause me to drown. And yet what is stored in glass belongs to me still. Each piece is a part of me: the hummingbirds, the locked doors, Mr. Morris in the yard, the pear tree, the woman covered by bees, and you. Especially you.”

— Alice Hoffman

250. “I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.”

— Alice Hoffman