Top 269 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Hoffman - Page 3

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

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

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.

The evening had turned sweet and blue.

Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone. I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.

I just finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," which I think is a work of genius.

Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon.

She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.

I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, 'More than you know.'.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

Real love, after all, was worth the price you paid, however briefly it might last.

The frightened walk away when love is difficult. I know that now. You have to be willing to give everything away. You have to be willing to end up with nothing. Only then will your heart be whole.

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

Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything.

The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe

...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go." From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102.

Sometimes words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.

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

People want to ignore what they can't understand. They're looking for logic at any cost.

Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.

He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.

He has the ability to catch someone by the way that he looks at her, and make her wish he would go on looking.

You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

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

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.

Some stories stayed with you even when you wanted to forget them.

Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones.

He fell in love with the way she closed her eyes, long before he fell in love with her.

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

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

She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless.

I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, they'd look, they'd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell what my rotten disposition was. Deep down, I wanted a commitment with a capital C. To get anywhere with me, a boy would have to sign his undying loyalty with his own blood.

I can hurt myself more than anyone else can, she told her sister. I can do it with my eyes closed.

Young Sally Owens: He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards. Young Gillian Owens: What are you doing? Young Sally Owens: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He'll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he'll have one green eye and one blue. Young Gillian Owens: Thought you never wanted to fall in love. Young Sally Owens: That's the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn't exist. And if he doesn't exist I'll never die of a broken heart.

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

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.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

Young people believe that regret is something you will never feel if you simply do as you please, but sometimes it is a matter of degree.

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.

Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?

The sisters were glad to be together. They had the easy sort of relationship where they didn't have to speak to be understood.

It wasn't right to have someone charge into you your world without even asking, acting as if you were nothing more than an egg to be flipped and flopped, sunny-side up or scrambled, depending on the whims on whoever ran your life..._

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.

What you dream, you can grow. Someone told me that, but I didn't believe it. I said I had nothing and that people with nothing are unable to dream. But I was wrong.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky.

We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hands over hers on the countertop, then hooped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot. 'I just wanted to wake you up', he said. Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever had been before was all over.

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