Alice Hoffman

Books may well be the only true magic.

Fairytales were maps formed of blood and hair and bones; they were the knots of the sub-conscious unwound. Every word in every tale was real and as true as apples and stones. They all led to the story inside the story.

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

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

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.

Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you.

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

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?

Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.

In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.

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

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

I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

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

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.

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

You can never tell about a person by guessing...that's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

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.

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..._