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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

354. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

356. “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

357. “Some stories begin at the beginning and others begin at the end, but all the best stories begin in a library.”

— Alice Hoffman

358. “She wishes he would come to her tonight, climb in through the window to lie down beside her and explain how it’s possible to love someone so much and still manage to carry on when you have to let them go.”

— Alice Hoffman

359. “Believers with nothing to believe in.”

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

362. “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

363. “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

364. “No one knows how to write a novel until it’s been written.”

— Alice Hoffman

365. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

378. “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

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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

395. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

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

— Alice Hoffman

399. “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

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

— Alice Hoffman