Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “A boy who is trouble is something entirely different as a man.”

— Alice Hoffman

352. “Some things are best remembered the way you want to remember them, like this road, these stars, this girl right beside him as they walk into the center of the cold night, looking straight ahead.”

— Alice Hoffman

353. “Hearts were made for being broken. There’s really no way around it if you want to be a human being.”

— Alice Hoffman

354. “When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn’t recognize her friend. Juliet hadn’t bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.”

— Alice Hoffman

355. “Love was the thing that tore you apart; it made you believe the lies you were told, obvious as they might be. It was nearly impossible to see your own fate while it was happening to you. It was only after, when what’s done had been done, that one’s vision cleared.”

— Alice Hoffman

356. “Then let us be among those who hope that the future will be less cruel than the past.”

— Alice Hoffman

357. “You couldn’t see love, or touch it, or taste it, yet it could destroy you and leave you in the dark, chasing after your own destiny.”

— Alice Hoffman

358. “I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass.”

— Alice Hoffman

359. “My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.”

— Alice Hoffman

360. “There are those who say that heaven and hell are not so far apart. They are not at opposite ends of the world beyond ours, only a step away from one another.”

— Alice Hoffman

361. “Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they’re not around. Too much free time!”

— Alice Hoffman

362. “I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.”

— Alice Hoffman

363. “Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.”

— Alice Hoffman

364. “Even with her failing vision, Violet West could see the scars. They had turned purple, almost red, from the icy cold, the color of the pears on the tree in the yard, the color of blood that can’t be washed away and of things that can never be undone.”

— Alice Hoffman

365. “It was November, that quiet, gray time of the year when you feel like holding someone’s hand. Gretel had her own hands clasped together, like a corpse.”

— Alice Hoffman

366. “He had appeared beside her because she had wanted him to. She had called him to her, and was calling him still. Even when she fell asleep, she dreamed of water, as if the world were topsy-turvy and everything she cared about had been lost in the deep. She plunged through the green waves with her eyes wide open, searching for the world as she’d known it, but that world no longer existed; everything that had once been solid was liquid now, and the birds swam alongside the fish.”

— Alice Hoffman

367. “I’m glad it all happened,” he says, “Even the bad parts.”

— Alice Hoffman

368. “Know what you want, and be sure of it, for regret gives birth to more regret and nothing more.”

— Alice Hoffman

369. “Women pitied her, but went on their way; they had their own troubles to attend to, and mercy was a scarce commodity.”

— Alice Hoffman

370. “Perhaps that was what my mother disliked most. I resembled her. I could not help but wonder if for some women, that was the worst sin of all.”

— Alice Hoffman

371. “She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.”

— Alice Hoffman

372. “In Berlin evil came to them slowly and then all at once.”

— Alice Hoffman

373. “If you took all the trouble most girls got into as teenagers and boiled it down for twenty-four hours, you’d wind up with something the size of a Snickers candy bar. But if you melted down all the trouble Gillian Owens got herself into, not to mention all the grief she caused, you’d have yourself a sticky mess as tall as the statehouse of Boston.”

— Alice Hoffman

Featured in: Romance Quotes

374. “Everyone should know exactly what everyone else is thinking and then people wouldn’t hurt each other so much.”

— Alice Hoffman

375. “I wasn’t quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn’t sure she knew me either.”

— Alice Hoffman

376. “They believed all books should be read, for as long as the reader liked.”

— Alice Hoffman

377. “They may be nothing like you, he had written, they may surprise you, they may even repel you when their behavior is out of control, when they climb out their windows and drink underage and break every rule, but you will love them in a way you had not thought possible before, no matter who they turn out to be.”

— Alice Hoffman

378. “In our world of shadows, there is no black and white but a thousand different strokes of light”.”

— Alice Hoffman

379. “When you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together.”

— Alice Hoffman

380. “She had lost some of who she was when she lost her beloved.”

— Alice Hoffman

381. “This day is going to be awful. It’s the sort of day you wouldn’t mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.”

— Alice Hoffman

382. “I had never felt so alive as when reading.”

— Alice Hoffman

383. “I felt I had come upon the core of the meaning of life, to discover and re-create beauty.”

— Alice Hoffman

384. “She read the color-coded series of Andrew Lang’s fairy tales to her mother. They became lost in an enchanted cottage with vines growing over the window. It was dark and it was quiet and they could hear each other softly breathing. Every story had the same message: what was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken.”

— Alice Hoffman

385. “Isn’t that what love makes you do? Go on trying even when you’re through. Go on even when you’re made of ash, when there’s nothing left inside you but the past?”

— Alice Hoffman

386. “But rules were never the point. It was finding out who you were.”

— Alice Hoffman

387. “The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven.”

— Alice Hoffman

388. “It was a small ceremony at the town hall, and they didn’t exchange wedding rings, but they kissed for so long at the counter in the hall of records that they were asked to leave.”

— Alice Hoffman

389. “To want someone so much could be a terrible thing, or it could be the best hope a man could have.”

— Alice Hoffman

390. “I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.”

— Alice Hoffman

391. “But Sally didn’t have the heart to fight back. She wore dark clothes and tried not to be noticed. She pretended she wasn’t smart and never raised her hand in class. She disguised her own nature so well that after a while she grew uncertain of her own abilities.”

— Alice Hoffman

392. “They learned that sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of live was to be granted your heart’s desire.”

— Alice Hoffman

393. “He wondered if what people said was true, that no one could hate you more than members of your own family.”

— Alice Hoffman

394. “Franny entwined her legs with his. She understood why ancient monsters were often made of two creatures, with two hearts and minds. There was strength in such a combination of opposites.”

— Alice Hoffman

395. “Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.”

— Alice Hoffman

396. “You cannot unwrite a death that has been written.”

— Alice Hoffman

397. “You were the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all that we needed.”

— Alice Hoffman

398. “Desire had a way of making a person oddly courageous.”

— Alice Hoffman

399. “What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for its sake.”

— Alice Hoffman

400. “She said she wanted a man like that, someone who understood sorrow, not someone who caused it.”

— Alice Hoffman