Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Believers with nothing to believe in.”

— Alice Hoffman

352. “Love wasn’t rational; there was no proof that it even existed outside of people’s imaginings.”

— Alice Hoffman

353. “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

354. “He carries books everywhere he goes so he won’t have to be bored by people.”

— Alice Hoffman

355. “Love like this wasn’t what he’d planned or wanted or expected, surely it was indeed a trap, for even when you tried to run away, it followed you through the grass and lay down beside you, it overtook common sense and willpower.”

— Alice Hoffman

356. “I had heard it said that Malachi wrote so beautifully the angels came to watch, for words were the first thing God created out of the silence and were still the most beautiful of His creations.”

— Alice Hoffman

357. “I don’t really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don’t want to get into someone else’s language when I’m working.”

— Alice Hoffman

358. “A boy who is trouble is something entirely different as a man.”

— Alice Hoffman

359. “My father was both a scientist and a magician, but he declared that it was in literature wherein we discovered our truest natures.”

— Alice Hoffman

360. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

362. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

375. “You know who you are. And I suggest you never deny it.”

— Alice Hoffman

376. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

378. “Women were hurt every day and kept the cause to themselves.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

380. “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

381. “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

382. “I believe in tragedy,” Shelby responds coldly. “Not miracles.”

— Alice Hoffman

383. “When she reached 44 Greenwich Avenue she went inside alone, and only the crow knew that it was possible for a woman to claim to have no heart at all and still cry as though her heart would break.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

388. “What she feels for him is so deep, she aches. She supposes this is what people refer to when they say the pangs of love, as if your innermost joy cannot help but cause you anguish as well.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

390. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

396. “Just know that what’s done can be undone, but what’s undone can never again be.”

— Alice Hoffman

397. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

399. “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

400. “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