Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “What is broken can also be mended.”

— Alice Hoffman

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

261. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

264. “As Gary understands it, the greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself, and he and Sally have both served themselves from the same table tonight, the only difference being that he knows what he’s missing, and she has no idea what is causing her to cry as she drives down the Turnpike.”

— Alice Hoffman

265. “Love is the one thing that’s not easy to find. It’s an achievement, Eddie, to feel such a glorious emotion, whether it’s returned or not. Some men never do.”

— Alice Hoffman

266. “Men and women rarely speak to each other, though they often talk.”

— Alice Hoffman

267. “He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.”

— Alice Hoffman

268. “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

269. “Lightning, like love, is never ruled by logic.”

— Alice Hoffman

270. “All things change, for that is the way of the world we walk through.”

— Alice Hoffman

271. “For some, witchery was a choice, but not for them.”

— Alice Hoffman

272. “But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain’s daughter who believed that people could fly.”

— Alice Hoffman

273. “She wondered if dreamers knew they were in a dream while it was happening, or if they had no idea that everything around them was purely imagined until the dream had gone.”

— Alice Hoffman

274. “The day had begun, cool and clear and absolutely impossible to avoid.”

— Alice Hoffman

275. “Anyway, the sort of love that will not wait is probably best to pass by.”

— Alice Hoffman

276. “Lately, she’s been wondering if perhaps when the living become the dead they leave an empty space behind, a hollow no one else can fill.”

— Alice Hoffman

277. “Vincent gave him the twenty. “You don’t think you might be looking for trouble?” Levi thanked Vincent for the loan, but laughed at the question. “Life is trouble, brother. You’ve got to fight for what you want.”

— Alice Hoffman

278. “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

279. “She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.”

— Alice Hoffman

280. “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

281. “It had been better to have viewed him from a distance, so that his flaws were left unseen.”

— Alice Hoffman

282. “That was the way illness appeared in a house, in the corners, in between floorboards, on the hooks in the closet, along with the sweaters and coats.”

— Alice Hoffman

283. “I don’t think I make much of a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic.’ They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I’m concerned.”

— Alice Hoffman

284. “Don’t waste time when there’s someone you love.”

— Alice Hoffman

285. “Our mother had taught us that when the moon was white, reappearing after its absence, it was showing us that what had been hidden could easily become whole again.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

287. “No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.”

— Alice Hoffman

288. “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

289. “It was believed that all creation came from thought, language, and mathematics.”

— Alice Hoffman

290. “I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.”

— Alice Hoffman

291. “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

292. “If a woman is in trouble, she should always wear blue for protection.”

— Alice Hoffman

293. “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

294. “You don’t need wealth to appreciate something beautiful.”

— Alice Hoffman

295. “I take responsibility for the man I used to be, for I carry him with me. As strong as I am, he’s a heavy burden.”

— Alice Hoffman

296. “Real love, after all, was worth the price you paid, however briefly it might last.”

— Alice Hoffman

297. “I think of life as a book of stories. You move through the stories and the characters change. But once you have a name on your skin you are stuck with one story, even if it’s a bad one.”

— Alice Hoffman

298. “Who but a fool would stay in one place and butt her head against the same window time and again?”

— Alice Hoffman

299. “Hochman had been right, the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.”

— Alice Hoffman

300. “Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.”

— Alice Hoffman