Alice Hoffman Quotes

Alice Hoffman Quotes

There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

Shut up and do not think. All the theorists agree: shut up and keep the words from being said. And all of the scars will remain invisible; and all of the scars will remain under the skin. Where they belong.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.

Do you ever just put your arms out and just spin and spin and spin? Well, that's what love is like; everything inside of you tells you to stop before you fall, but for some reason you just keep going.

When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always.

Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.

Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.

We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.

But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

He knew even at an early age of seven, how dangerous it was for someone like him to have hope. He knows how to have no expectations. He can completely control not just what he wants, but what he needs

Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure.

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.

Books may well be the only true magic.

Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

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.

If she wanted to enter an otherworld, all she had to do was open a novel.

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

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him.

Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

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.

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it.

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

They weren't true stories; they were better than that.

Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn't have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.

Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.

... the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.

... a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

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