Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

353. “All this kissing was making her crazy; it was reminding her of what she could feel, and how it could be when you wanted someone as much as he wanted you.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

355. “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.”

— Alice Hoffman

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

359. “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

360. “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

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. “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

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. “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

366. “You want to know what love is? Its the thing that ruins you.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

368. “I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.”

— Alice Hoffman

369. “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

370. “At first it appeared as if something with wings had fallen from above... perhaps an angel who had faltered then drowned, in tears of this poor tired world.”

— Alice Hoffman

371. “She takes the fortune cookies from the bottom of the bag and throws them into a glass bowl she keeps in the closet. She has no desire to know what her future might hold.”

— Alice Hoffman

372. “She’s beginning to wonder if perhaps she’s haunting herself.”

— Alice Hoffman

373. “She, who prided herself on her tough exterior, could always be undone by the beauty of flight.”

— Alice Hoffman

374. “Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn’t been divulged.”

— Alice Hoffman

375. “He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”

— Alice Hoffman

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

376. “Is there more to the story?” Vincent asked. “There’s more to every story,” his aunt told him.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

381. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

387. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

389. “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

390. “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

391. “She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you’re bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you’re sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows you’re there.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Love has nothing to do with time or space.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

397. “When a star reaches for you, it is difficult to look away.”

— Alice Hoffman

398. “But love was not about practice or preparation, it was pure chance; if you took your time with it you ran the risk of having it evaporate before it had even begun.”

— Alice Hoffman

399. “Even now as the graves of these women went untended, and their passings unmourned, the seeds they had scattered turned the hillsides red and orange from May to September. Some called the pirates’ bounty flame trees, but to us they were known as flamboyant trees, for no one could ignore their glorious blooms, with flowers that were larger than a man’s open hand. Every time I saw them I thought of these lost women. That was what happened if you waited for love.”

— Alice Hoffman

400. “Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they’d follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.”

— Alice Hoffman