Alice Hoffman Quotes - Page 2

She’d bought a blue notebook in the pharmacy to write down her aunt’s remedies. Star tulip to understand dreams, bee balm for a restful sleep, black mustard seed to repel nightmares, remedies that used essential oils of almond or apricot or myrrh from thorn trees in the desert. Two eggs, which must never be eaten, set under a bed to clean a tainted atmosphere. Vinegar as a cleansing bath. Garlic, salt, and rosemary, the ancient spell to cast away evil.
Alice Hoffman
Blue must be worn for protection. Moonstones were useful in connecting with the living, topaz to contact the dead. Copper, sacred to Venus, will call a man to you, and black tourmaline will eliminate jealousy. When it came to love, you must always be careful. If you dropped something belonging to the man you loved into a candle flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, he would arrive on your doorstep by morning, so you would do well to be certain you wanted him there. The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove. It had always cost $9.99 and was therefore called Love Potion Number Nine, which worked best on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month.
Alice Hoffman
The most glorious hour in Manhattan was when twilight fell in sheets across the Great Lawn. Bands of blue turned darker by the moment as the last of the pale light filtered through the boughs of cherry trees and black locusts. In October, the meadows turned gold; the vines were twists of yellow and red.
Alice Hoffman
...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.
Alice Hoffman
Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.
Alice Hoffman
When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.
Alice Hoffman
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
I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.
Alice Hoffman
I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.
Alice Hoffman
Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.
Alice Hoffman
My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.
Alice Hoffman
Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.
Alice Hoffman
She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe.
Alice Hoffman
That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.
Alice Hoffman
The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.
Alice Hoffman
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
But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.
Alice Hoffman
People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.
Alice Hoffman
... 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.
Alice Hoffman
... the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.
Alice Hoffman
I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
...never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own.
Alice Hoffman
Every man engaged in war tells himself he can alter what has been written, that it is he, not God, who is the maker of destiny, free to change what is meant to be.
Alice Hoffman
The best way to die is when your living
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
I once believed that life was a gift. I thought whatever I wanted I would someday possess. Is that greed, or only youth? Is it hope or stupidity? As far as I was concerned the future was a book I could write to suit myself, chapter after chapter of good fortune. All was right with the world, and my place in it was assured, or so I thought then. I had no idea that all stories unfold like white flowers, petal by petal, each in its own time and season, dependant on circumstances and fate. ~ Green Heart, Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
Mean people are meaningless.
Alice Hoffman
It was a miracle to live as birds do, except for one thing: anyone seen in flight would surely be captured, perhaps even shot down like a crow flying above a cornfield. It's always dangerous to be different, to appear as a monster in most people's eyes, even from a distance.
Alice Hoffman
I'm trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found.""That can be as hard as looking for a shadow.
Alice Hoffman
He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.
Alice Hoffman
James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never find their true song.
Alice Hoffman
I head a bitterness that hadn't been there before. Something was changing inside him. He'd had enough of following the rules.
Alice Hoffman
It's still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I'm sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you.
Alice Hoffman
Love was never a mistake,even when it wasn't returned.
Alice Hoffman
Don't make me sit through reality.
Alice Hoffman
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
Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.
Alice Hoffman
He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.
Alice Hoffman
Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.
Alice Hoffman
Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.
Alice Hoffman
From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...
Alice Hoffman
Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.
Alice Hoffman
It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.
Alice Hoffman
I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
...who I am to talk? I dream of rain.
Alice Hoffman
Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Alice Hoffman
She allowed me to understand I'd done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me she was afraid. It was exactly what I wanted when I had cancer and I thought I was going to die. I should have sat down next to her, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. That's all anyone wants. It took me a long time to figure this out. It's a complicated human puzzle. But it's never too late to know that love is all you need.
Alice Hoffman
Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.
Alice Hoffman
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
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.
Alice Hoffman
Books may well be the only true magic.
Alice Hoffman