Top 500 Alice Hoffman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I can’t really work on more than one thing at a time.”

— Alice Hoffman

352. “The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.”

— Alice Hoffman

353. “The aunts always kept their promises, and they still do. They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.”

— Alice Hoffman

354. “Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith.”

— Alice Hoffman

355. “Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you’re not careful. They can eat you alive.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

357. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

360. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

362. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

364. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

366. “She shuffled her feet as she was told that she had been taken in by the family as an infant, and that every family in town without a daughter adopted a girl infant or child. She was raised to inherit the laundry and the housekeeping, the cooking and the sorrow, and the kindling of the fire in the early morning when no one else would even think of getting out from beneath the mountains of blankets and quilts.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

368. “They didn’t understand why a brave, independent woman had been so brutally treated. Many of them began to wonder why they themselves often feigned opinions rather than speak their minds, no matter how clever they were, for fear they’d be thought of as difficult.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

373. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

375. “Love someone and they’re yours forever, no matter how much time intervenes, that’s what Margaret Grey knew. The sky will always be blue; the wind will always rise up across the meadow and thread its way through the grass.”

— Alice Hoffman

376. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— 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. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

389. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

391. “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

392. “He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

394. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

397. “Once you possess something others do not, you are a target for the wicked.”

— Alice Hoffman

398. “Finding your soul mate is like coming home to a house where everything is familiar. You can walk in the dark and know where everything is.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

400. “Night and Day, they called them, and although neither girl laughed at this little joke or found it amusing in the least, they recognized the truth in it, and were able to understand, earlier than most sisters, that the moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”

— Alice Hoffman